


Consequences

by veep39



Series: Starless [2]
Category: Underworld (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-10
Updated: 2007-12-10
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:45:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 40,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veep39/pseuds/veep39
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peace amongst their own kind turned out to be more challenging than peace with the lycans. The remnants of the coven move into uncharted territory.  Sequel to End of Our Days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Boy, Revisited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted the original version of this prologue chapter on Bloodfeud's "Open Sketch Night" on 9/9/2006 as a challenge response.

**_16 ½ years ago..._ **

A boy, 8 years old, slopped through the muck of a wide river to his favorite spot on an island, just offshore. The minnows cleared a path for him through the shallows until he finally reached dry land away from shore and away, somewhat, from civilization. But the cicadas were never very far away, un-parted by his progress, calling him from the trees to join them.

They had arrived as an invading army – at first just a few scouts, and then came dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of them, singing, calling, and flying all about. Their singular calls merged together and became an amorphous din. He likened it to the sound of a flying saucer landing or a phaser from the old Star Trek episodes that his father watched (he preferred The Next Generation and had a crush on Dr. Crusher). Except... this phaser noise didn't stop and wouldn't stop, he'd been told, for eight weeks. His uncle, the middle school science teacher, had told him what they were called, why they were there, and all of a million facts about them. Even the name of them was strange: _cicada_.

He'd found some of their larger cousins in summers past – those cicadas that came every year and sat high atop the trees, ever announcing their presence in August. He'd stared into their bulbous, alien eyes and marveled at the sleek body and enormous wings. They had no mouths – only a thin straw that they poked into tree stems and sucked the juices out. Then they laid their eggs in soft stems elsewhere. But the invaders now surrounding him were a different variety. They looked different and sounded different. Their life cycle was different. He'd found loads of grubs attached to trees, shedding their skins to become something... _different_. As grubs, they lived below ground, out of sight, out of the sun, for years – then they became airborne, to call, mate, and suck. His uncle had taught him a new word: _metamorphosis_.

He'd wondered about using grubs for his fish hooks, but his grandmother had admonished him: "That's cruel!" He didn't see why worms were fine, but not cicada grubs. The birds, after all, had a field day with the visiting hordes. A few settled on him as he fished and he supposed it would not do to try and fish with them if there were so many of the adults around to witness the deed. He'd tried to shoo them off, but after awhile simply allowed them to land near him and crawl about him. His usual fishing companion, Eric, was absent today – off visiting his own grandmother in Pennsylvania. So, he fished alone, except for his new friends who crawled and flew this way and that. He missed Eric, but some things about him he didn't miss, such as the other boy's insistence on calling him "Mikey."

Voices, out of place in the cicada hymn, interrupted his fishing. Other boys, older than him, headed toward him from farther down the shore of the island. Then they saw him and began running toward him. Momentary irritation at the interruption of his fishing turned to terror at what he imagined these kids might do to him. His heart thudded in his chest as he bolted to his feet and took off around the tip of the island and splashed into the shallows. He swatted away two cicadas that had taken up residence on his shirt sleeve. He'd left his fishing rod and tackle box – his life seemed more important.

"Hey!" the boys called.

Michael turned around and saw them running up and over the tip of the island and then into the water after him. He would have to run faster. His breathing grew hoarse and his heart felt as if it would explode. He ran faster than he thought possible, up the opposite shore and up the trail. They might have kept pace with him, but they probably didn't know where in the shallows they should put their feet to keep from sinking in. At the top of the trail near the towpath, he found the bushes where he'd ditched his bike. He seized it and dragged it up to the pathway. He looked both ways – taking way too much time, he thought – and ran with it down the packed gravel. He jumped aboard, landing unevenly and painfully on his thigh, and pedaled as if his life depended on it. _If only I was a cicada, then I could just sprout wings and fly out of here_ , he thought.

He pedaled for a time and then dared to glance behind him – the pursuing boys had stopped running after him and stood on the towpath, mocking him.

"Hey, come back!" they yelled. "You forgot your fishing pole! Hey, thanks for the fishing pole!"

He thought of giving them the finger, but was so grateful to be out of reach of their paws that he didn't want to risk a renewed pursuit. He settled into a slower pace, finally, confident that he'd lost them. In time, the sound of his insect friends drowned out the catcalls of his pursuers.

Back in the hammock of his uncle's cabin, he drifted in and out of sleep at dusk. When his eyes opened, the blurry trees soared above him, almost completely leafed out in a renewed cycle of growth. Two of the ageless plants supported the hammock that cradled him in his sleepy state. Soon the setting sun would be exchanged for rising moon and the chilling air would force him awake and back inside.

It had been a trying day and it was good to rest in the blanket of the calls of the changelings who carried on with their lives and paid him no mind. In his head, he replayed the harrowing incident from earlier in the day. He dreamed of the day he would grow up and could lift the big weights like his cousins. Then nobody would mess with him. Night fell, eventually, and he yielded to the crickets and frogs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First draft of fic completed on Lycan The Underworld on 12.10.2007; posted to Unnatural Selection on 12.20.2007 and updated. Posted to AO3 on 2.23.2013.


	2. Return

**_6 ½ weeks ago..._ **

_"There's no going back, Michael."_

While Selene sheltered in Lord Florian's mansion, taking stock of the cataclysmic changes in her life, Michael executed a plan to revisit things he'd known, once upon a time. He'd grown restless living in the ex-security chief's satellite mansion, attending lengthy discussions between Selene, Florian, and assorted other vampires about the future direction of the coven since the deaths of the Elders, his 50th great grandfather, and another immortal uncle. While they'd discussed, the South American coven had stepped in with the intent to stabilize the shattered European coven. They and Selene regarded each other warily across a great ocean.

Meanwhile, he'd felt as if things remained undone in his own life – the job that he'd abruptly left, the shot-up apartment, and the broken contact with his family. To start, he decided to venture back to his apartment building. He didn't know whether he would find blood and destruction – the condition of it when he'd been unceremoniously dragged out of it by her – or even a building at all. Selene had offered to accompany him and even to drive him there, door to door, but he'd refused. He could not do the required mental housecleaning if she preoccupied his senses and his mind, parts of his being that needed rest.

Once an immortal, his senses allowed him to appreciate the world more intensely than ever before, but he found that he wanted to experience things from his mortal world as an immortal would. He didn't want anything new for a time.

He'd been introduced to war and had been threatened with his life. He'd repulsed threats to Selene's as well, falling in love in the process. All of them and all that they knew had nearly come to an end at the hands of a madman – his own flesh and blood. If there was any lingering effect from being dead momentarily, it was a heightened appreciation for life – not just his own, but for others'. After two and a half weeks, he'd begun to long for the little things that he'd once known and taken for granted – such as the accomplishment he felt when healing the sick and broken, the smell of cooking aromas in his apartment, the taste of homemade ice cream, and the last memory of mortal love.

Michael had realized of late that there _was_ a way, though limited, of going back. "Is that something you were told? I think you're wrong," he'd replied to Selene, surprised at the tone that he'd taken. They'd gone to the garden, one of the few places they could be alone within the sanctuary of Lord Florian's estate. His agitation forced him to stand, in the cold, while she watched him from the audience of a cold, stone bench.

"You're no longer human."

"Your entire reason for existing for the past six centuries was based on the death of your family and you're going to cavalierly suggest that I forget my own? In effect, treat them as if they were dead?"

"Michael," she said, looking at him patiently, but intently, "once you're an immortal, you _must_ treat them as dead."

"Didn't Viktor say that he gave you immortality as payment for the loss of your family, and that it was a good bargain? Do you really believe that?"

Her face darkened as he lectured her. She remained, however, as stoic as trees who withstood the ravages of their world. "It's the only way. You must forget them, Michael. What will they do if they figure out what you are? What will they do if you lose your temper and hurt one of them? How will you explain to them that you can't sit down to dinner with them?"

"I'll find a way," He said emphatically. "I love them and I can't just abandon them. I won't subject them to this, if I can help it. I love you, too – and I'm not going to try and choose between you and them if that's what you're wondering."

"No. I just want you to be safe," she said softly.

"I understand, but I have to make these decisions. I'm two and a half weeks old in my new life, Selene, and I need to be able to grow in my new skin."

"No, Michael. You might reveal all of us, and what then?"

"You can't substitute for them," he said back to her, and then regretted it immediately. He continued, softly, "Selene, when can I live on my own?"

She swallowed and then sighed quietly. "Go, then. Do what you have to do."

"I'll be fine."

"I'm also afraid you won't come back."

"Won't or can't? The world can't keep me away and you know it."

He watched her bite back a ready response. Then she said, "Neither I, and of course I act like it."

"This is something I need to do, Selene," he declared, as forcefully as he could in a whisper.

She gave him a few moments of silent eye contact, tracking back and forth. She finally said, "Call me if you need me."

He was glad that she'd said that.

  
\--0--   
  
  
He rode the M2 to the station nearest his apartment building and exited as he'd done so many times before. The world around him physically remained the same, but details that he'd never noticed before leapt at him. He absorbed amplified sounds, sights, and smells in abundance and then recorded each in his now-perfect, indestructible memory, substituting for what had been recorded before the change. Even a short tram ride to his street filled him with wonder. This part of him he could appreciate.

He occasionally nodded to passers-by as he walked closer and then entered the building. He found it hard to resist staring at people that he'd become familiar with for months, as if they were now somehow new acquaintances. He unconsciously sought out some new aspect of them that he'd not noticed before.

The corridors of his apartment building appeared as before. The sameness gratified him and recognition reassured him. Sameness equaled sane-ness. He arrived at his apartment door to find it locked firmly. The key, which he still possessed, still worked in the lock and he ventured inside. He glanced behind him as he entered, as he'd always done when he'd been mortal, and then shook his head when he remembered that he need no longer do so. He looked again anyway, but this time out of challenge and not from wariness. He made a mental note to cancel his membership in the local gymnasium. He extended a nail from a fingertip and tapped on the new wooden door, just to remind him that he could, even in this world in which he'd once lived.

The insurers had probably paid for repairs to the common areas of the apartment building, but had evidently done little more to his apartment than to repair the holes in the ceiling and reapply plaster that had shaken loose from pounding on by lycans. Plaster chunks still littered most of the main living area of the apartment. As he inspected the repairs and strolled about, his foot contacted something hard and rolled slightly. After regaining his balance, he reached down and picked up a shell casing. In amusement, he remembered his shock at being picked up by Selene and then the subsequent, horrific racket as she fired rounds into the ceiling after raiding lycans.

Nearing the kitchenette, a smell told him that useless, mortal food spoiled in the refrigerator, having been neglected since he'd left it all behind. Over the next hours, he cleaned, straightened, and reorganized his former life. He thought of packing his possessions and then returning to Florian's mansion, but in the end thought better of it and so left things as they were, albeit in better shape than when he'd first walked in the door. His rent, utilities, and everything else had been paid up, fortunately, before he'd received Lucian's bite, so he might as well stay. After making the apartment presentable, he picked up the phone and dialed his coworker, Dr. Lockwood.

  
\--0--   
  
  
"I think you owe me an explanation," said Lockwood.

"I wish I could give you a decent one," Michael said after a moment.

Lockwood leaned against the counter near the sink, arms folded. "The last time you were in the hospital, you had a hole in your shoulder."

Sitting at his kitchen table, Michael kept his body language as open and as unthreatening as he could. "That's healed up."

"How about the rest of you? You talked about being bitten by a man, that you'd been kidnapped by a mysterious woman, and that your head was exploding."

Michael looked to the side, toward the window. "How does Nicholas feel about all this?"

"I've been covering for you, so you owe me more, in fact, than an explanation – which you haven't provided yet."

"So he's not going to fire me?"

"You're a good doctor. But, you're still an intern and need to show some dedication to what you're doing. You know that. If we were in the States, you'd be _gone_." Lockwood shook his head for emphasis.

"What do I need to do to come back?"

"Report to Nicholas and provide a decent, or at least decent sounding, excuse."

Michael considered what to say next – whether to lie like crazy or tell him the truth. Telling him the truth would break a cardinal rule of the immortals. Revealing the immortal world to a mortal, either deliberately or inadvertently, meant a loss of control of that knowledge. A mortal could save himself from instant death by pledging never to reveal the knowledge to another. Michael thought of Lockwood as a friend, but could he trust him? How could he keep up his charade? He could simply leap out the window, figuratively, if things got too hot. Then he grinned. "A werewolf bit me," he said through a manufactured laugh that he pretended to suppress.

He looked up to find that, to his relief, Lockwood grinned back at him from his vantage in the kitchenette.

Michael leaned back in a pose of exaggerated relaxation. "The woman who kidnapped me was a vampire. She took me to her mansion and we had great sex."

Lockwood chuckled and reached for the refrigerator. "Got any beers in here?"

"Help yourself."

"Want one?"

"No, not tonight."

"You don't have any food in here, but... whew!"

"Yes, everything I had spoiled in the last couple weeks."

"This place looks like hell," Lockwood responded, looking around.

"Yeah, I had a break-in," Michael said with a sigh.

"Didn't lose anything I hope?"

"No, not that I can see. I don't have much."

"Did you ever talk to the police?"

Michael thought for a moment. "Why did you turn me in?" he said, with actual annoyance.

"Did you see those officers? They meant business. They knew you were there, for some reason. Did they catch up to you?"

Michael took a deep breath. "Yes."

"And they took you in for questioning?"

"Yes."

Lockwood gestured at Michael with both hands. "And that's why you were gone for two weeks?"

"Yes. They were questioning me. Actually injected me with some stuff,..." he said, voice trailing off. It wasn't far from the truth.

"Good God," Lockwood said with a gasp.

"Yeah..."

"Are you OK?"

"Yeah, fine," Michael said softly.

" _What_ attacked you, then? Your shoulder was a mess."

"It was a dog," Michael said, trying to sound dismissive.

"So it _was_ a dog."

"Yeah. And I think I might have had some bad halászlé at a roadhouse." He tried to blend the truths that he knew into his conjured story. Then he thought of Selene's ordeal at the hands of her lying surrogate father and of the society that she'd left – an organization that seemed to take frequent liberties with the truth. He felt vaguely ill and then tried to rationalize the sensation away. _What Lockwood didn't know wouldn't hurt him, right?_ He thought.

Lockwood gazed back at him for several long moments. "I should say you have," he said, pushing himself away from the counter. "It looks like you've sworn off food in favor of beer," he added and then winced. "Look, whatever you went through, I hope it's done and you won't have to deal with cops, monsters, or bad food or whatever. I think you had a bunch of stuff happen to you, apparently all at once." Lockwood drew closer to emphasize his point.

"I'll be there," Michael muttered.

"Get some rest," said Lockwood, setting his empty beer bottle onto the counter. "Oh, and if your new girlfriend has a friend, preferably of the non-blood sucking variety, I'll take it as payment for covering up for your absence."

"Thank you for doing that. You didn't have to."

"If you need to talk about... your time in jail or whatever, let me know. Have you called your folks yet?"

"Shit," Michael said, rubbing the back of his head.

"They called the hospital looking for you – pretty worried."

Michael fought off a wave of anxiety. Another Corvinus descendant snooping around Budapest didn't seem like a wise thing. He found himself glancing over to his answering machine that urgently blinked a red light at him. "Thanks," he said.

"See you tomorrow?"

"Yes," Michael said with a hospitable grin while putting his hand out.

Lockwood shook it and then zipped up his coat in preparation for leaving.

After his apartment door clicked shut, he picked up the phone to place the expensive international call. If his folks hadn't shown up already, then there was a good chance they hadn't purchased tickets or weren't in the air on their way to Hungary. He wondered if they'd filed a missing persons report and then he wondered if his story about being questioned by the police would hold up. He wondered if he was still actually sought by the police. If they came near him again, he could simply disappear again. He didn't want to cause acquaintances and his family any more anxiety, but in order to survive he might have to pull a disappearing act... and then go back to shelter with Selene. _Perhaps she was right._

He loved Selene, but the world that she and the other immortals, both friend and foe, had pulled him into had threatened to deprive him of his family and a career that he enjoyed. He missed his humanness and resented what he'd become, not by his choosing. But he would do anything for Selene – even avenge the death of her family on her behalf. Would she help him remain in contact with his? Perhaps his father could be turned so that he could be with Michael always? Then he remembered the dream, or perhaps pseudo dream, from when he'd died upon a wooden stake just outside his ancestor's ship. No, even an immortal Corvinus in Budapest wasn't a wise thing.


	3. Lycan Night

The surgery complete, Michael stepped out. In broken bodies, he sought refuge from his own broken thoughts. In the operating room, he was in charge, he called the shots, and he ordered his thoughts to do what was necessary for the patient. In focusing solely on the patient and the skill he wielded there, he cured himself, albeit temporarily, of the thoughts that threatened to undo him.

The effort to suppress the alien thoughts tired him, but even after hours of surgery, his energy level remained higher than his team members. He busied himself in the washroom in an effort to continue the sure sense of purpose that he felt when doing the things we has trained to do. He then went to his locker where he kept his mobile phone while in surgery. He checked his handful of messages, of which one in particular stood out – from Selene. He smiled inwardly as her first words reached his ear. Here was another thing to distract him and he was grateful to have it.

_"Hello Michael. I guess you're in surgery. Ah...bad news: Haruye's team was attacked while on patrol tonight. Lajos is dead and we're pretty sure by an UV bullet. History repeats itself. We... don't know where the lycans are who attacked, but we're all heading out to try and track them. Give me a call when you can."_

He felt a chill of anxiety go through him to match what he detected in Selene's voice. He knew Lajos – a competent warrior who spoke to him more than most and seemed to accept him as part of the coven more than most. Contrary to cynical expectations and the weight of history, the deaths of the Elders and of Lucian had after some time seemed to bring about a tacit cease-fire between the species. The events of this night, however, as Selene described them, were therefore completely unexpected. They'd deluded themselves into thinking that they, in the coven, would live their lives happily ever after. The downed vampire rekindled memories of a number of recent events that he would much rather forget – except the memory of finding Selene and having her in his life.

 _All in a day's work,_ he thought. They both dealt with bullet trauma injuries tonight. For him, it was a fact of life in the city. Hers, on the other hand, wasn't supposed to be happening. This was not the way things were supposed to go after the bloodbaths at Lucian's redoubt, William's prison, and at Castle Víg. When would they all run out of blood to give?

Three full moons ago, the animal part of him awakened to see Selene kill Lord Viktor, a vampire that she'd known as a surrogate father for all of her immortal years. She'd thrown off his influence, as a star suddenly and violently explodes its outer casing, but a still-hot core remained. Then he'd been with her again, at least bodily, as she'd killed Lord Marcus. And then two full moons ago they'd defended Marcus' castle against counterattacking lycans. Was tonight to be the start of yet another cycle of conflict that he would be party to? Would she need the animal within, again? Would he do the right thing in his mindless, animal form? Would she still need and love him when his senses returned, _if_ they returned?

He pushed away from his locker where he leaned in thought, and then slammed both it and his phone shut. He discarded his scrubs, put on his coat, and navigated the maze of dim corridors to the outside. There, on Dologház Street, he found others from the ward standing and relaxing while obliviously smoking and chatting in the dark.

He pulled out his phone and looked back at the looming, Cold War-era Trauma Hospital. He'd stated his need for one part of him to remain here, in the mortal world, for the sake of his own sanity. So he found himself here, seeking escape from the whirl of violence that he'd been caught up in of late. He'd easily become a violent machine when the time called for it, but the intensity and mindlessness of it unnerved him. When he went partially mad in the change and became the hybrid in the flesh, responsibility and conscience left him. In the change, instinct replaced fear, like a death dealer.

When it was over and his mortal mind came back and reassumed its role, he couldn't deny what he'd done while changed. The flesh of the enemy still remained under Michael Corvin's fingernails when the hybrid released his body to him. Then he could see, in delayed witness, what had been done by his hybrid body. _I'm done with you,_ it then said. _Now, you clean up the mess._ And he did. There was nothing he could do, it seemed, to keep some sort of schizophrenic thoughts from wreaking havoc.

"Do you need me?" he asked into his mobile phone, pacing the sidewalk toward the western end of the hospital.

"No, not right now," said Selene. "Could you even get away?"

"No, I don't think so. We've had a busy night."

"Right, Dr. Corvin. So have we."

"Are you OK? Where are you? I can tell them it's an emergency," Michael said.

"I'm fine. You know me – indestructible. We're just looking around – some driving, some walking. We've got all eyes that we can spare scanning the city to try and pick up something."

"Didn't anybody see who did it?"

"No. It's a sniper, we think. They took a cheap shot."

"Cowards. I'll come by in the morning."

"I can't wait," she said.

She sounded as confident as ever. Not only was she still a death dealer, but second in command of security in the new regime. It was true – she didn't need him at the moment, at least not with an urgency that he needed to interrupt his shift and call attention to his activities. There was no use doing so if he didn't need to. He'd been successfully flying under the radar for quite some time to make up for his weeks-long disappearance from the hospital. The chaos surrounding the shootout on the M3 line and the subsequent manhunt provided a convenient explanation for his scarcity. The police, fortunately, no longer sought him, allowing him greater freedom of movement and to indulge his mortal needs.

Above the din of traffic, he heard a pop from a short distance away, and up. At nearly the same time, he flinched at an abrupt sensation of pressure and then pain in his lower trunk. Then the pain expanded and began to burn, like a hot ember had violated his body. _Don't tell me,_ he thought through the pain, and then felt around his midriff. _Yes, not as bad as a kidney stone, or being impaled..._

He quickly found the hole where the unbelievable bullet had gone through. A bloody patch formed on his t-shirt there and spread. His respiration quickened as he felt his muscles strengthening with the onset of the change. The instinctive need to find cover to avoid a follow-up shot combined with the need to hide the change from passers-by and his colleagues. He didn't want to be rescued and hauled back into the hospital to have his coworkers puzzle over his miraculous recovery... or the death of his extraordinary body.

He'd experienced bullets before, several in fact, that he vaguely remembered from Kou's machine gun two months ago. Those conventional bullets didn't hurt like this one, though. Since his death did not appear imminent from the strike, he walked a short distance down to the end of the building and went right, down an alley around to the rear. A short way in, he hunched against the building. He jabbed at the skin around the bullet entry wound with his razor-like fingernails and then began working them into his flesh, navigating his way in like the surgeon that he was – but who at any moment might become a mindless, panicked, ripping machine. Then he remembered what Selene had told him about bullets – if he was strong enough, he could push them out as his body healed. As he strained against the bullet lodged in his lower back, he gave the air a sniff. Scents of both lycans and vampires blew on the wind, and close. He decided he shouldn't stay outdoors any longer than necessary, especially in such an out-of-the-way place.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of effort, he heard a soft plink between his legs on the stone walkway. The burning pain in his body immediately eased, to be replaced by a dull ache along the bullet track. As the hybrid receded, he leaned down to pick up the object between two fingernails and found, to his surprise, that the shard left a glowing blue residue on the tips. He put it in his pocket and then slowly continued down the alley to find his way to the main entrance on Gázláng Street.

The sniper that had killed Lajos had likely come to try and dispatch him, too... but, why? Was this a coordinated attack or the same lycan? He tried to walk into the main lobby as nonchalantly as possible. The guard at the security station gave him a look which Michael responded to with a nod as he passed. He guessed it probably wasn't every day that a doctor with a bloody bullet hole in his clothing waltzed into a hospital without distress – but he arranged his coat as best he could to avoid a spectacle.

He debated whether to call Selene back. It was probably best that she knew – militarily, the more information she had, the better. He resisted the urge, however. The last time he'd been involved in a shooting, he'd become wrapped up in the lycan and vampire war. Denial threatened to kick in, but he decided in the end that she would likely have a fit if he didn't let her know. He found a public phone in an alcove and dialed her number.

"Hello?"

"It's me: Michael," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting at a small, well-used, wooden desk.

"You're not on your mobile phone."

"Well, there's a reason. A few seconds after we hung up, I got shot."

Selene became silent for several moments – deafening to him.

"I'm fine," he continued. I pushed the bullet out. It's UV."

"Really?"

"Yes, and there are both lycans and vampires in the area – I smelled them both."

"Where did the shot come from?"

"Down the street. I think it came from Kerepesi Cemetery across Fiumei."

Then she exploded. "Michael, you've got to get out of there."

"I'd much rather..."

"You're not safe there. They're on to you and they'll kill you the first opportunity they get."

"I'm fine. I'll... I'll sleep at Dr. Lockwood's and then come to the castle."

"And what are you going to do after that? Put your life in jeopardy again and again?"

He changed his voice to a strong whisper. "Look, they're relying on me here. I'll change my route, change my clothes, etc. Maybe I'll take a vinegar bath or something so they can't smell me."

"Your life is more important than your job."

"My job is my life, Selene. That's why I made such a big deal to come back here."

"Yes, I know," she said softly. "But if somebody takes another shot at you, I want you to get out of there, understand?"

"Yes, I will." He relented only to stop the discussion. He thought of letting her know that this bullet, for him, had apparently all of the effective physical impact of a hangnail or a paper cut. It hurt enough to get his attention, though. He'd learned this evening that one UV bullet wasn't going to do him in – either the lycan who took the shot was unaware of his endurance or it was intended to send a message. The message was perhaps this: _we know where you are and we can reach you._ He might have to quit the hospital for good, and _that_ he simply didn't want to do. They would have to do more to convince him.

  
\--0--   
  
  
For all of his new-found physical toughness, that one bullet unsettled him enough that he couldn't sleep. He might as well have just slept in his own apartment, as restless as he was. His body had been through worse abuse and he'd survived. He'd even died, but still that single bullet unleashed all manner of tribulation in his mind.

So often lately his mind retreated when his talons advanced. The proximity of lethal force and his momentary change into a hybrid reminded him all to clearly of an episode not very long ago. He knew he'd been dead with an immortal's absolute clarity, and yet... as much as he tried, he couldn't recall the exact instant when he'd died, impaled on a jagged protrusion of wood below the _Sancta Helena_. When hybrid, his higher mental functions disengaged, leaving only the most rudimentary thoughts. But even in that state, he knew that Selene, his love, the thing that drew out primal emotional response, must be protected. His need for her and his connection to her penetrated into his hybrid, inhuman form. What sort of love was this that could break despair's grip on him and stay with him from mortal to immortal and from life to death to life again?

Upon the stake, as pain and consciousness left him, _he_ spoke in the strange memory. When he awoke again, airborne, disoriented, and needing her, _he_ spoke again. _He_ spoke something that _he_ 'd spoken before, in another life, from another's memory – Lucian's, it had to be. Could it be anybody else? What strange things could speak through him at his moment of death?

As death had left him, it left a memory behind. Why had it come to him? Why now? What was its purpose? Was it as important as the memory of Sonja's death? Was the memory so important that it must awaken him so that he could carry out its unknowable command? Was he no more than a vessel, like Lady Léna, for these alien thoughts? How much of his memory was really his? These alien, unnatural thoughts drove him away from immortals and back to his former life. But when he touched her hair, looked into her eyes, held her body, and felt her warmth around him, what did it matter? Nothing else, so long as she was his world. Separated from her, his new world became alien, and so he craved familiar things from his former, mortal life. There was no in-between and he couldn't escape into his own thoughts.

In the misplaced memory, he reclined on animal skins in the warmth of home, receiving guests. One guest, a sandy-haired lycan, argued with him. The reason for the argument was lost in a dreamy haze, but the thesis stood out: _"Go now, Emánuel, but with my reluctant blessing, for you know in your heart there exist no trustworthy vampires."_


	4. The Old Castle

Michael stepped inside the light lock and then waited a moment for the outer doors to close and the inner doors to open, sealing lethal sunshine out of the castle, this old edifice in the hills just north of Budapest. Two armed guards awaited him inside, not surprisingly due to the time of day, as the cycling doors groaned to a halt.

"Good afternoon," Michael said to the vampires, who looked back at him with ageless, inscrutable expressions. He imagined some secret resentment that they harbored at his ability to sashay in and out at will. The light lock allowed daywalk-capable beings such as him, Selene, and mortals to enter and leave Castle Víg on a whim. That he bedded one of their own probably wasn't lost on them, either.

He'd synchronized his sleep and work schedule with Selene's as much as possible so they could maximize their time together, if they chose, on any given day or night. He felt enough at home that he thought nothing of popping over to her new home for a visit. His hybrid nature allowed him to come and go as he pleased, even at this unusual hour of the late day when even he should be asleep and peacefully dreaming. A memory from another time and place, however, wouldn't let him. The bullet wound from just hours ago was another wakeup call. He'd shrugged it off, almost literally, but knowing that he was again a marked man added to the tension he already felt. Selene's reaction to the whole episode would add still another dimension.

Repeated analyses of the memory didn't seem to help, but his mind performed the cyclical, near-pointless exercise anyway, running like a hamster on a wheel in a cage. It spun there in the background, along with the panoply of other thoughts and concerns that he mulled over on a daily basis. The difference was that it was one of _those_ memories – of foreign origin and unknown meaning, refusing to resolve itself fully with each analytical pass. He had no use for and no context for this broken piece of memory that lodged inside of him, like it had been shot there in malice. He couldn't squeeze it out of him and be rid of it, no matter how hard he tried.

He ascended a wide, polished granite stair that began just beyond the light lock's threshold under the eyes of the guardians who wielded scowls and firearms. At its top, Michael emerged into a spacious, open plaza on the main floor of the castle. By now-familiar smells of blood, cigarette smoke, and toiletries particular to vampires greeted him. A fluttering noise drew his attention to his far left, where he noted a small group of the castle's residents holding court, perched on stools and chairs like a flock of crows. The plaza had seen grander days as a gathering place for nobles and warriors alike, under vaulted, painted ceilings and an immense candelabrum. He could hardly remember, though, the first time he'd been inside the castle one month ago. He'd been in hybrid form at the time, engaging lycans. He possessed indistinct memories, hazy images, and vague sensations of a dizzying, whirling pursuit on all hard surfaces of the room. He'd bit, torn, and killed while Selene, Orbán, and others had stood in the center, almost on the dais, raking machine pistol fire around the chamber in a desperate effort to put down the lycans in their midst. At the time, like the other times, he hadn't known why he must kill the lycans, only that he must.

Anything on two feet rising from the street level light lock had to pass under the gaze of the soldier vampires who congregated in this sanitized battlefield-turned café. Several of them glanced his way as he stepped onto their level. "Welcome back, Mr. Corvin," said a voice behind him, just out of his peripheral view. He'd scarcely noticed his smell, but the mortal made it a point to let him know he was there and paid the same regard, however brief, as the vampires.

Michael glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the short, balding, middle-aged man. He realized then that he'd forgotten his manners. He recovered and said, "Thank you, Oscar." Miraculously, this glorified mortal butler had survived the recent mêlée. The castle had lost 16 vampires and five mortals in the one night of battle one month ago. The lycans had been driven off with 20 less than their original force and there had been no encounters since, to his knowledge, until last night.

He turned his attention back to the group of sipping and chatting vampires. A few nodded to him as he stood at the top of the stairwell. He acknowledged them with a briefly raised hand and then set off to his diagonal right, toward another yawning opening where another stair lay.

As he walked across the plaza, his eyes drifted upward, eight meters toward an immense fresco whose size reminded all who looked upon it of Marcus' leadership against lycans in a long-ago battle. The faded and grimy painting hadn't entirely escaped damage from claw and bullet when the real war had broken out on the stone floor below. The artwork, like the castle and its proud citizens, had escaped mostly intact and the castle, at least, underwent repairs. The blue eyes, looking down, reminded him that Marcus lived on, albeit in a different form and quite some distance away than the heavenly perspective above him. He appreciated the history, but the lycan in him appreciated his entrée into the castle even more. But he also imagined that the observer above him didn't look on approvingly.

Just a couple hours from now, at nightfall, he would begin to hear muffled clunks and whines as the masons continued other repairs at the top of the castle. Selene had asked him to help in the early days, just after the battle had been won, but at the time he could scarcely do more than haul broken stone and bodies. He'd gladly obliged, but his specialty was the wounded human body, not a banged up 15th Century castle that Marcus had, in ages past, called his home.

He reached the opening that led to the ballroom and then took an immediate right into a cramped, conduit-lined stairwell. Down this same stone stairwell, coincidentally, he'd carried several dead immortals to their appointment in the furnace.

He followed the well-traveled path into the residential level where Selene and other soldiers slept, two stories below the ballroom. On the way, he passed two other citizens of the castle as he sought her out by smell. Most of the mortal and vampire servants, what little he saw of them, seemed not to pay him much mind. They did, however, nod to him as they passed, as if they were on a country road where it would be almost improper to at least raise a couple fingers on the steering wheel to acknowledge a fellow traveler. The close quarters also begged some acknowledgment – certainly when in the stairwell. Occasionally in his travels he caught women sneaking glances at him, which made him smile inwardly and sometimes outwardly.

Her residential level was laid out in a series of triangular alcoves, almost ten meters long each and linked end-to-end. Each was equipped with couches, chairs, tables, and a single electric torch. Four suites led off from two sides of each alcove, with the third side making up part of a dim walk-through corridor. He went to a point of the second triangle and walked through a wide-open doorway into her darkened suite.

He'd never been to her suite in Ordogház and so had not much of an idea of what it had contained – he only knew from what she chose to tell him. The whole mansion had passed into her memory, and like many vampires, she tended not to have much use for nostalgia.

If it were so easy. Easily he recalled in his immortal, photographic memory the first encounter with her hard, hazel eyes set in soft, pale skin. Blackness and mystery had shrouded her and ultimately, he'd found, protected her. Then he'd done what no lycan had done before, and that had been to breach the exterior and change her, permanently. He alone could strip away the protective layer and be with her. In turn, she enveloped him and protected him from all the new strangers that surrounded them. They walked as strangers among their own, strange kind, but when she shed her metal and opened for him, he found humanity.

Her suite was perhaps two meters wide by five deep. For whatever reason, she parked her utilitarian bunk just inside the doorway. A bureau loomed beyond, in the corner where cinder block met solid rock. Around to the left, beyond the washroom entry, sat a small desk with a phone and small fluorescent lamp. Along the long wall beyond, facing the bureau from across the room, a large work bench rose on sturdy timbers from the tiled floor. Guns, gun parts, cleaning accessories, and toolboxes lay scattered liberally about the room. All she had for seating was the desk chair and a stool in front of the workbench.

A night-light from the washroom bathed part of the room in a blue glow and in it he could make out her telltale lump on the bunk. He always imagined he'd find her lying flat on her back, limbs arranged neatly, as if in a coffin. Instead she'd thrown her limbs haphazardly and her hair had followed suit, matted onto the side of her face exposed to him. He brushed hair off her cheek and her eyes fluttered open.

"Rise and shine," he said and turned on a wall lamp that hung above Selene's head.

"Bollocks," she commented and squeezed her eyes back shut.

"Move over," he said and sat down on the sliver of real estate between her torso and the edge of the bunk.

"Where is it?"

"Where's what?"

"Where they shot you. How are you feeling?"

He pulled the mangled bullet out of his pants pocket and handed it to her. Then he attempted to snatch off her covers.

She grabbed them back from him and dropped back down, flat. "I guess you're fine." She held the fragment out in front of her eyes and then tossed it back to him. Then her eyes scanned back and forth in space as if picking up thoughts from where she'd left them when bedding down that morning.

His own playful stab at normalcy had masked his own disturbed thoughts. "Did you take pictures?" he said, getting up.

She nodded once and glanced in the direction of her bureau.

He pawed through the pocket litter that piled there, found the small camera, and began to scroll through the photos.

"We've had a month of quiet and now _this_ happens," she sighed from the bed.

"Is it a big deal?" He needed to hear her say it, even though he knew there was slim chance that it wasn't.

"The feud is supposed to be in truce. I wonder what prompted this dustup."

"Are you really surprised? Nothing was ever settled." They'd repulsed the lycans that attacked the castle and that had been pretty much it.

"I just thought...," she paused as she rolled her head slowly from side to side, "I thought our lack of response after they attacked us would have communicated something to them."

"Like what?"

"Like, 'All right, you retaliated for what we'd been doing for upwards of a month, and now we'll leave you alone'."

"I guess they don't feel the same way," Michael said from her bureau. "Maybe they just regrouped and now want to finish us off."

"Or somebody had a debt that needed repaying."

"What kind of debt? Why would somebody want Lajos – or me – dead, specifically? Kou, Ádám, and the rest led that fight, right?"

"As if the attack on this castle didn't settle a score quite enough. Maybe a rogue lycan has a problem with us." Then the tone of her voice changed to exasperation. "If they're going to attack us, then they should just attack us."

"And so the cycle starts again – round and round. You don't want to go back there, do you?"

"To the war? Of course not."

"Does what happened tonight warrant a response?"

"We'll have to see what Florian says, but right now we need to rebuild our own presence and not go off half-cocked. The death dealers will be looking for any excuse to shoot. Maybe it will go to Council and everybody will have a chance to cool off."

"I was asking _you_ , actually. Are you going to let this incident lie?"

Her eyes sought his, and then focused outward again. "Maybe I don't have to go to Florian. I've got you here to tie my mind into knots without having to go upstairs. Vigilance is called for, Michael, and that's all. That'll be the official line. But, personally, if somebody takes another shot at you, they might have me to answer to."

He propped an elbow on her bureau while he listened and glanced back and forth between her and the lifeless images of Lajos on the camera. "I think... that Amelia had the right idea." He glanced briefly in the direction of her aquarium that hummed quietly on a stand at the back wall.

"You mean permanent disengagement? Just get away from the conflict like she did?"

"Something like that. I mean, once you've done something over and over for so long, maybe you don't need to do it anymore. Then you won't have to worry about deciding to reignite a war."

"But this is my home. I have responsibilities here."

"We both do," he said low enough that he nearly whispered. Then he straightened and went to the tank, turned on the light, lifted the hatch and put a pinch of food in.

"We have to survive, Michael. We can't afford the luxury of choosing."

He gazed in at the tropical fish as they devoured the food, never needing to convince themselves of anything. "She's about to give birth," he said absently.

"Yes," Selene responded after a beat, frustration creeping into her voice and her scent. The bunk squeaked.

He turned around to see that she had swung her legs over the edge and sat upright, at attention, body tensed to respond to her own unwelcome thoughts.

He went to her, sat, and put an arm around her. She returned the gesture and held him tightly. He put a hand over hers and rested both on her bare thigh. Her approving smell washed over him in response.

"I don't know how much longer we can hold out, especially if they start hunting us down," she whispered.

"We can always become like the fish and swim off."

"I'm sorry about all of this, Michael. You have no control over who you are or where you are. You've been dragged into a situation that you had nothing to do with. I wish we _could_ just swim off, but your attacker needs to be answered."

"I'm not completely helpless," he said with a grin. That response drew a pointed look from her, and then she went back to her thoughts. For the moment, he completely forgot about his own as he chased her scents.


	5. While You Were Dead

They left her suite to ascend to the main public space of the castle to obtain their breakfast. As Selene was wont, she'd left her head wet from the shower. As she walked beside him, she bathed him in a freshly shampooed scent. Though the soap plume overlay her natural odor, her reactions to her environment would leak through uncontrollably. It was one more prism through which he learned about her world.

Though he had entry rights into the castle, and even into every crevasse in it, Michael had never felt completely at ease. He'd striven to learn about it and, by extension the coven, anyway. Through conversations with other residents, he'd been given a history lesson about life in the castle before the recent lycan attack that he'd helped to repel. For example, after the death of Lord Víg amidst the slaughter, the daily social held over breakfast at his behest, one of many such ritual gatherings, had dissolved. Vampires – nobles especially – who had kept the appointment over the centuries could no longer comfortably feed in the great dining hall. Víg had owned that room and had even presided over a makeshift council there while Marcus slept. Then his short-lived effort to replace the coven's power structure with his own had ended when Léna had ended his life. The nobles had presumed that he would preserve their reign in the castle, so much so that they didn't conceive of any configuration otherwise. Now, the nobles struggled as much as he to fit into the new way of the coven.

The coven's nobility, already scarce after the burning of Ordogház two months ago, had in the last month become scarcer, mainly from having changed their habits out of naked fear. A noble no longer governed the castle, but a soldier did instead. The death dealers and soldiers had therefore co-opted the stripped, once opulent plaza and turned a corner of it into a café, complete with a fountain of free-flowing blood. They gathered there to chat, argue, plan, and watch the comings and goings of the castle's remaining residents. The soldiers' efficiency had replaced the grandeur and pageantry of the nobles' reign, fallen in the aftershocks of the plan set in motion by Lucian and Lord Kraven that none of them could have foreseen.

The loss of the old traditions, for some reason, concerned Michael – for Selene's sake. Perhaps the loss was yet one more sign that the coven might never completely recover from the deaths of the Elders, the destruction of Viktor's mansion, and finally the direct assault on Castle Víg by lycans. The viability of the vampire race seemed now to be jeopardy.

At the end of the climb of narrow, aged, stone steps, the immense, 800 square meter plaza hove into view. Within sight of the entrance to the shuttered dining hall opposite, in one corner of the plaza just to the left and beyond the steps leading to the outside, the industrious, victorious warriors had mounted tall tables and a counter. The rise of new militancy in the castle was marked by the ascendancy of Orbán, the self-appointed successor to Lord Víg, as master. His de facto lordship came into conflict with the Council of Three, which now governed the coven and claimed ownership of the castle. Orbán sought to trump this paper ownership by bypassing the Council and imposing his will, through the soldiers under his command, whenever convenient.

The odors of lycan blood, vampire blood, gun smoke, and fear on that fateful night had eventually dissipated. The lycan assailants had been defeated and their ravages subsequently cleaned up. Wall paintings and furnishings that had been lanced by bullets and blindly trampled by both him and the animals had been removed, disposed of, or repaired and reinstalled elsewhere. They likewise had gathered up the broken and torn bodies of immortals that had lain together like a lumpy, bloody blanket in an abattoir. They'd pitched them unceremoniously into the furnace three levels below, filling the air of the castle with the acrid stench of cooking immortal flesh. Then they had rolled up and burned the carpets as well. _The furnace might now hold Lajos' remains,_ Michael noted. In time, the coven had installed stack scrubbers and an improved ventilator system to keep the smell away. How his 30th great-grandfather disposed of corpses on his yacht remained, to him, a mystery.

As Selene and Michael approached, the assembled death dealers and others noted them and then straightened. Orbán stood at a table with Henrik, Lipót, and Izidor, while Kou and Duncan chatted with Haruye at another. Though they all now lived together in the same castle and had always been a part of the same coven, they segregated themselves into cliques consisting of Marcus' warriors or Viktor's remaining death dealers. Selene gravitated to the latter, her title notwithstanding.

Michael hung back as Selene walked to the center of the group. He folded his arms and gazed across the clutch of black-clad vampires at Orbán, who stood at attention, opposite. She prepared to speak, but before she could say anything, another handful of vampires came into view from the same stair that he and Selene had just left. They trotted across the plaza toward the café to hear whatever important things the deputy chief of coven security might have to say.

"Good afternoon, all," she said perfunctorily, moving near Kou's group, by habit. She remained standing, along with half of the warriors around her.

They answered her in a range of nods, mutters, and clearer expressions of greeting. Haruye returned and handed her a filled crystal cup.

She nodded once in reply and addressed the group. "There's nothing new. Lajos was thankfully the only one of us to die last night. If you don't already know, Michael was also shot. From examining the bullets, I've determined that the UV round used in both attacks came from the same gun – a sniper's rifle."

Several of the vampires glanced in Michael's direction. "Did you turn up anything in your searches?" Lipót asked, interrupting her.

"No, or else you'd know about it. The obvious conclusion is that a lycan, or perhaps several lycans, targeted us last night."

Kou stood and maneuvered around tables and vampires on a serpentine path toward to the fountain. He punched Michael in the arm as he drew near. "Taking one for the team?" he muttered.

Michael flashed a half grin and then turned his attention back to Selene.

She continued, "Lord Florian has authorized us to search the city tonight to find the lycans who've done this. If you can capture one for questioning, do so. If you're fired upon, of course fire back with the usual discretion. The covenants apply – do not engage unless you have to. Not only am I curious to know _who_ did it, but also _why._ "

"Who cares? We know who did it," interrupted Henrik with barely concealed sarcasm. He glanced at Orbán afterward, seeking approval for his outburst, and then took a drag on a cigarette.

"Did you pick up any leads?" asked Kou, returning.

She shook her head. "I stayed out almost to noon, but... nothing. Snipers were apparently watching us last night while we had our guard down."

"That's because we're not shooting them on sight, much less watching them, like we used to," Orbán groused.

Selene's smell betrayed her sudden agitation. She focused on Orbán like a laser. "You remember how they repaid us for the last round, don't you? A month ago you stood with me on your comrades' bodies in this hall... and on top of that blood-soaked rug," she snapped, pointing to a tapestry hung above the fountain of blood.

"We know where they are. We could easily take several down," said Henrik.

"You mean you _think_ you know where they are," Orbán muttered back at him.

"You have your orders," Selene said. "Do not engage unless you have to. Our priority is to obtain information. We are to maintain a _defensive_ posture."

"I say we act defensively and mow them down," said Orbán.

"Do what you want, Orbán," she snapped with a raised eyebrow, "but you might wind up back in the ring."

Michael inwardly congratulated Selene for the dig at Orbán, who'd been bested by Léna, with Florian's help, after he'd challenged her. Michael tired, though, of the predictable animosity and headed for the fountain.

For his part, Orbán simply looked back at Selene sideways as he also stepped toward the flowing blood to refill his cup. Michael met him there and looked up at the ruined rug that Selene had pointed to, saved from that bloody night by some of the warriors. They'd hung the ghastly relic up as a backdrop to the café in remembrance. The stale smell of commingled lycan and vampire blood, oblivious to vampires, repelled him.

"Hey, medicine man," Orbán said to Michael as they arrived at the fountain together. "I'm impressed she was out in the day trying to find the perpetrators," he continued, moving into his space. "What do you think is going on out there?"

"I really couldn't say." Michael supposed that, to a vampire, roaming around in the day was still impressive no matter who did it.

"It's not any easier to see in the day, is it?"

 _If I had time, I could spend a day or two and just test the wind,_ Michael thought. The warriors were polite to him, as most of the vampires seemed to be these days – even Orbán, who, though hard to read, seemed always to be thinking about things. He chafed under Selene's authority and the two didn't get along. Ordinarily they were civil to each other but Michael resisted taking sides, preferring instead to observe from the sidelines. "To me, it looks like somebody who prefers war to peace."

Orbán seemed to laugh. "That simple? It would seem that a response from us would be in order, wouldn't you agree? I doubt, however, that the _powers that be_ would allow a proper one." He turned momentarily toward Selene, who continued her briefing to the others.

"Maybe the _powers that be_ have a good reason for not engaging the lycans – again. It seems like provoking them would be the height of foolishness."

"I understand the reasoning, but I think anything would be better than sitting around helplessly while there's some sort of lycan sniper out there. I say go after the lycans again, like we did after the Elders all died – but I know that's not a fashionable opinion these nights."

"Didn't we just shovel a bunch of corpses into the furnaces? Didn't you hang that carpet up as a reminder?" Michael felt his hackles rising in spite of himself.

"You're missing my point, dear Michael," Orbán said under his breath. Then he stepped still closer and said, " _Anything,_ including death of us all, would be preferable to sitting around waiting. I say we take them on and make them work for their victory. Are we not death dealers?" Orbán made his case quietly, deliberately, and confidently – so much so that he could easily be convincing if it weren't for the unreasonableness of his argument.

"Well, I guess I'm just a medicine man and I don't understand, right?" Michael said just as softly.

Orbán pulled a cigar out and prepared to light it. "I thought you'd think differently with your survival at stake, but wait..."

He didn't wait for Orbán to finish his subtly insulting comment. "I think you've made your point," he said. He walked away and rejoined another argument in progress at Kou's table. Other vampires began to walk off to collect their gear and assemble their teams.

"...Fine, Kou, you can take your fabulous aim and entertain the lycans," snapped Selene, surrounded by an exasperated cloud. "I agree with Florian on this one."

"There's always the American coven," Kou said with a shrug.

"You know we don't want to go there. I don't think Léna and the rest of us can exist in the same continent, let alone the same city. She wore out her welcome and she's gone for a good reason."

"Some of us want her back," said Kou.

"Including you?"

"In a way, yes."

"For Amelia?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"I didn't know her as well as you, but you can't have her without the others. Viktor comes back too, and that's where I draw the line."

"I suspected."

"So let's put away those nostalgic thoughts... please?"

Kou grinned, but Michael smelled little mirth behind it. "You might have more of Viktor in you than you'd care to admit. I could get used to protecting you."

Selene closed her eyes in resignation. Then she pulled her HK and checked the clip. Michael noticed a pronounced drop in her agitation whenever she did that. "A bunch of us have his bite marks, Kou, but he would regret having turned me if he knew what I thought lately."

"Strike teams, boss?" Orbán asked, nudging his way into the small group with an exaggerated, expectant facial expression.

"We're not _fighting_ them yet," Selene snapped, avoiding eye contact with him.

"'Yet?' There's hope for you, Selene... but I can see into the future as well as anybody. It's just a matter of time."

"It may just be an isolated incident," Selene replied. "No need to overreact."

"I'm not sure I could overreact to somebody _killing_ us," said Orbán.

"You should be content with what Lord Florian has authorized us to do. _Find_ the lycans. Is that so hard?"

"Does that include me?" Michael interjected. "You could use an extra nose."

"If you can spare the time, you can come with me," she responded, trying unsuccessfully to flush the irritation out of her voice.

"All right. When are you leaving?"

"As soon as the sun goes down, of course. Why?"

"I've got some things to do online, if you don't mind. I'll be in the library," Michael said. "See you later," he added softly and then left them. Soon after, the conversation between her and Kou started back up again.

"Amelia, huh?" she spat.

  
\--0--  
  
  
He left them to their planning and he descended the flights of steps past the turnoff to Selene's floor, to the library corridor a flight below that. A short time later he arrived in a small alcove containing eight terminals, just beside the library. Two vampires busily punched keys while a mortal gazed at a monitor, apparently lost in thought. Michael logged in to check his hometown newspaper and sports websites. He noted the time and quickly checked his e-mail. For his family, he kept up the façade of being of the mortal world, but he didn't know how long it would last. He'd blown off Christmas with a work-related excuse, but he was running out of stories to stall them. He quickly responded, logged off, and then wandered toward the library in search of Štefan.

Michael couldn't think of anybody else who might be able to help decipher the orphaned dreams. As a fellow scientist of sorts, he hoped the archivist would simply listen. He still learned about himself on a daily basis, but Selene, far from being the nurturing sort, frequently just gave him a stern talking to if her mood wasn't quite right. They were there for each other, but she had her own issues to work through after the truth had hit her like a thunderclap. He prevailed upon Duncan, at times, when he needed to talk to an immortal who was not his lover nor his sire.

He entered and, not immediately seeing Štefan in the lounge and reception area on the left, walked to the right toward reading desks and the stacks beyond. He found Štefan mid-way down, shifting volumes from one shelf to another. He noticed Michael, frowned, grasped a book, and walked back to the reading area via another aisle.

"What can I do for you?" asked the archivist as he gave Michael a wary eye and placed the book on a wooden reading stand.

Michael stepped toward him, but kept his stance unthreatening. He didn't want his street-wise attitude, an artifact from his mortal days in strange, European cities, to inhibit his quest for information. He was aware of the fear, real or imagined, that he might instill in other immortals who truly knew his nature. "I want to look up something," he said simply.

"Such as?" Štefan asked nasally.

"As in: whether there is any record of non-combat contact between Lady Amelia and lycans – and if there _is_ , how did she contact them? Is there a way that Lord Kraven contacted them, other than ringing them up?"

"That's an interesting request," Štefan said. He stepped behind the reading table and buried his nose in the book. "Contact them for what?"

"Just to communicate with them."

"How do you know such an avenue exists?"

"I've been having a strange dream that suggests a possibility."

Štefan frowned. "Do I look like your psychologist?"

Michael gaped at him for a moment. "No."

After a longer pause, Štefan asked, "What's this about?" He kept his attention otherwise within the expansive and weighty book.

Michael took a step closer and leaned toward the vampire – within arm's reach. The librarian's smell confirmed that he noticed. "It's actually not a dream. It's a memory."

Štefan finally looked back up and stared back at him through small, brown eyes. Pale, papery skin stretched over his facial bones. He had almost no lips, but an abundance of short, thick hair that he combed straight back. He'd apparently decided Michael was now worth his full attention. He removed his long, thin fingers from the book in front of him as if disconnecting from a mind-meld.

"Is there a lycan named Emánuel?" Michael asked.

"Don't tell me Emánuel bit you, too?"

"No. I have one of Lucian's memories of a lycan named Emánuel."

"Just how many memories do you have, Mr. Corvin?"

"Just the two – Sonja's death and now this."

"That _is_ interesting."

"I started recalling it after Marcus impaled me at Alexander Corvinus' yacht."

"You mean while you were dead?"

"Actually, it came to me after I awoke. It felt like I suddenly remembered something that I'd forgotten."

"You're sure you're not imagining it?"

Michael nearly barked as his temper began to slip. "Can you just try and look it up, please? A memory is a record but a dream isn't. I know it happened. Is there any record?"

"Come back in a half-hour and I'll let you know."

The answer took Michael aback. He had thought for a moment that the answer must lay in the book that Štefan studied at that very moment. "What – you don't know off the top of your head? Wouldn't a vampire remember it if it had been indexed?"

"Mr. Corvin, what you ask for is most likely in Lord Tanis' private journal collection, the entirety of which I have not read. You seek a record of an activity that is against covenant – and _still_ is against covenant, if we accept the laws set forth before the burning of Viktor's mansion and the sacking of this place."

Michael gaped back at the archivist as he took in the tirade. "Take all the time that you need, then. I don't want to get you into trouble," he replied with a dash of sarcasm.

"Does Selene know you're doing this?"

Michael returned Štefan's stare. "No," he said acidly. _As if I needed permission._

The archivist sighed and looked back down at his book. "What are you going to do if you do find a way to contact the lycans... if there's a way other than to go out into the streets of Budapest and shout at the top of your lungs? That's the most obvious way."

"Don't worry – it's not to start a fight. Why do you want to know?"

"Didn't you just get shot by one?"

"Yes."

"Then why make the effort to contact?"

"I want," Michael began softly, and then continued more loudly, "I _want_ to find out what this memory means. It _means_ something."

Štefan regarded him again from behind the book. " _I_ have an interest, as well, Mr. Corvin. I'm a vampire, too, if you haven't noticed. This room is where I hid while the lycans rampaged through the upper stories a month ago. I don't want a repeat of that if it can be avoided. You must act responsibly and I will not furnish the information if I believe you will not."

"This may be an opportunity for peace that... at least some of us want. Don't you want it? Avoiding conflict is the very thing I'm after. If we make peace with the lycans, we... you... won't have to cower any longer. Perhaps it's nothing – but I must do this because I can't turn _this_ memory off." Michael straightened and then said, "I've got to run – I'll be back tomorrow afternoon to see what you've found."

As Michael left, he felt the man's eyes on him. His scent had changed ever so slightly during the exchange – to something Michael recognized as anxiety, if not fear. _Good._ He also noticed that his own hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

He walked back into the terminal alcove to collect his bag. He paused and momentarily drummed his fingers on the back of a chair. Surreptitiously he'd obtained the e-mail address of Lady Léna. His heart thudded in his chest as he considered whether to send a note. Marcus' memory was alive within her – and it was memory from before he became a destructive hybrid. Was the madness that had infected Marcus as a hybrid destined for him, a Corvinus and a hybrid, also? Michael wanted to know, by whatever means. He also wanted to know whether the multiple memories that maddened Léna provided a glimpse of what he had in store if Lucian's memories within him continued to breed. He noticed, however, that he was less anxious after his outburst in the library. He'd taken a critical first step and it heartened him.

  
\--0--  
  
  
After nightfall, Michael rode with Selene as they embarked on a search for the perpetrators. They situated themselves on Selene's familiar high haunts and gradually worked their way upwind to stay out of the nose of any lycans who might have been afoot. Michael's olfactory abilities, thanks to Lucian, assisted Selene in their search pattern. Michael had been spotted in a similar fashion just two short months ago. Now _he_ was a watcher atop the skyline under, in turn, the gaze of the moon.

After sampling the air at the downwind end of the city, he came to the early conclusion that the incident the prior night was probably isolated. Lycans were indeed afoot in the city, but the odor was just baseline. If there was a large pack on the move, it was not obvious and there seemed to be no imminent major attack in the works. He told Selene what he thought of her plan to capture one for "questioning", given his knowledge of their questioning methods. He wasn't sure if Selene would take his advice or not and whether his worries made any difference to her. Thankfully, though, she'd dressed in street clothes and had left the Corset of Amelia in her closet. Their search, ultimately, proved fruitless.


	6. V, Inverted

"Hello, Michael," Lucian said in a dream, and then raised a pistol. He fired it, point blank, and Michael felt the explosion in his eardrum and the impact like a hammer in his temple. The bullet plowed through his frontal lobe, the corpus callosum, and the temporal lobe, eventually coming to rest in the back of his skull. It broke open, spilling out searing light. In the light, a figure walked up to him and embraced him – the blonde lycan known to him as Emánuel.

  
\--0--  
  
  
Michael startled awake and then slowly raised himself up on his elbows. His fingers went instinctively to his temple, but he found that he remained whole. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through nearly-shut slats of his bedroom window blinds, projecting barcode patterns on the opposite wall. His thoughts went to Selene and her more-than-the-usual silence over the last day, which made him wonder what distracted her. Some things the sun could not illuminate.

It was during quiet times like these that the unwelcome visitor came to him. He imagined the foreign memory grew like a cancer, intending to eventually take over his mind and obliterate the being known as Michael. It sought some kind of release, perhaps on a scale similar to the destruction of Viktor. The agony that he'd felt when witnessing Sonja's death, in his mind, seemed only to have abated then.

He didn't have to look far to find an example of what kind of madness might be in store for him. Like his Corvinus uncle, he was a hybrid, albeit of a seemingly different variety. So far, thankfully, he hadn't exhibited the same megalomania. Like Lady Léna, Michael had suffered trauma that preceded the revelation of the memories. For him, impalement on a stick did it; for Léna, the death of her mother and the burning of Ordogház had released a millennium of experience to her. Like Léna, he found that what concerned the memory therefore concerned its new owner. Would he wind up like her, who'd gone mad from drowning in the accumulated memory of the Elders?

Fortunately for her, her life had been saved when the death dealers had shipped her back to physically distant and psychically saner shores in Brazil, away from reminders that drew the Elders' memory forth. The coven had pushed her out to save itself from coming apart from within. Selene had returned to the coven just before the Brazilians lost their way and needed guiding back to safety. He wondered about an UV bullet's disruptive powers, both within a vampire and within a coven. He wondered what the coven might need to do if his memory became indistinguishable from Lucian's and whether Selene would accompany him on whatever journey that Lucian's memory bade him.

  
\--0--  
  
  
He tracked down Selene, with her face pinched, later that same afternoon in the castle café. Ordinarily on this particular day of the week, he might not have come by for a visit, but he'd wanted to return to the castle to find out if there was anything new in the hunt for the perpetrator. A phone call would not have done the job – he wanted to smell her, see her, and to know what had happened after he'd left the search team and gone to the hospital. After tending the wounds of crash, assault, and accident victims, he wasn't in a particularly good mood, either. Their lives had suddenly become unpredictable again.

Others drank in the café, but she kept her own company in the periphery. She looked up at him with darkened, distant, and determined eyes as he approached.

"How did it go?" he prompted.

Her eyes tracked his and then lost focus. "We brought one in for interrogation."

Michael felt his stomach turn. He swallowed. "Where is it?"

"Where's what?"

"The _lycan_."

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Tend its wounds, if it's still alive."

"It's still alive. It's downstairs – you can visit if you want."

He began to back away to get his breakfast. "Did you get anything out of it?"

"Not really. It denied everything."

"Can I question it?" He asked, filling a cup.

"What can you do that we couldn't?"

By way of reply, Michael jabbed a finger at his nose and then strolled off, sipping as he went. He didn't know what he'd find, but he wasn't happy at what had transpired. His encounter with an UV slug the previous night no longer seemed to matter. Suffering was his enemy, not a shooter.

He didn't need directions to find the lycan, only to follow its smell, which wafted up the stairwell from the level where the vampires held him. Arriving there, he passed a vampire going the other way – Otis. He and Michael nodded to each other as he continued down the cramped, stone-lined corridor. Past the furnace room, the passage opened into a wider room. Inside, along one wall was a row of stout, steel doors. Several bloody implements and probes rested against a wall outside one of the holding rooms. Stressed lycan smell overpowered everything else.

Michael peered through the nearby cell door window and saw a man hanging slumped toward the back wall. Chains, bolted to the floor and ceiling, held him suspended upright with limbs spread wide. His head drooped and his partially hidden face wore an expression of pain that Michael could readily detect from his vantage at the cell's entrance. The lycan sweated into his tattered clothes, adding to red, bloody patches. The grimacing and the sweating made Michael suspect that silver shards or something else foreign had been introduced into the lycan's body. The torture reminded Michael of the impossibly painful sting of whips applied to Lucian.

He found the keys on a wooden rack near the entrance to the underground jail. The prisoner made no movement as Michael opened the cell door and then tossed the keys outside. He stood in front of the lycan for a moment, within spitting distance, and then put his shoulder bag down. He reached out to examine the lycan's right arm, which bore a red streak larger than the rest. The captive lycan suddenly convulsed and emitted a roar that sounded like it came from shredded vocal chords. It swallowed and then let its head drop as it fell back into semi-consciousness.

Michael gingerly began again.

After a few moments, the lycan drowsily looked up at Michael as he worked and then managed a quizzical expression. "You're not a vampire," he rasped.

"No," Michael said.

"What are you?" the lycan said.

Michael looked into his bloodshot eyes. "I'm Michael."

"Are... are you a lycan? How are you...?" it said, voice failing.

"Quiet down," Michael said and looked over his shoulder. "What's your name?"

"Moise. Are you going to interrogate me, too?"

"No."

"What are you doing?"

"Taking the silver out."

"Are you a doctor? Like Singe?"

Michael glanced back up into his face. "I am a doctor."

The lycan shut up and let him work.

After he extracted six silver slugs, Michael asked, "So, who shot the vampire and me?"

The lycan shuddered. "I don't know _anything_ about a shot vampire," he spat out with great effort and then slowly raised his eyes to Michael's.

"What are you doing?" a voice suddenly said from the direction of the doorway. In his peripheral vision, Orbán stood just outside the cell entrance with his arms folded. He needn't turn to register Orbán's irritated smell behind his conversational tone. Other than his odor, he concealed his outright hostility to lycans well.

Michael took a deep breath and turned at his waist. "Treating his wounds... and asking some questions."

The lycan rasped beside him. "Get _that_ away from me," he said. Michael turned back to find the lycan's face contorting in fury.

"Michael, what did you do?" asked Orbán, with concern more evident.

"I took out the silver."

"Why?"

"He doesn't know anything. We should let him go."

"How do you know?" Orbán barked.

"His smell," Michael said, voice rising.

"How many lycans have you smelled?"

"More than you."

"I doubt that. We can't let him go, Michael."

"Why not? We'll just kill him instead?"

"There have to be consequences for what the lycans did last night."

"I don't care about my bullet wound. He said he had nothing to do with it and I believe him. Why shoot an innocent man?"

"Give me a minute and I won't be so innocent," the lycan said in a voice somewhere between a croak and a screech.

"We can't give them the impression that we are weak."

"We _are_ weak, Orbán," Michael said.

"Well, there's no need for them to know that," Orbán replied.

Not knowing what else to do, Michael gave the lycan a last cursory examination, packed up his bag, and shouldered out past Orbán. As he made his way back down the corridor to the stairs, he heard the echo of five shots ringing out behind him. He flinched, stopped, and then continued on. He wondered what he could've done and cursed himself for not staying there in the room, physically blocking Orbán from doing anything. _As if I knew he would shoot him._ He continued through the echo in his mind with his mood very much the darker.

  
\--0--  
  
  
He returned to the café, but Selene had vanished. Reversing course, he descended two levels and proceeded to her suite. He found her there, sitting at her workbench with Kou at her shoulder, reviewing maps. Pieces of her pistol lay on the bench behind the paperwork, as if she'd been interrupted.

"Haven't got time to talk," she said tersely behind a curtain of hair.

"Heading out again?" Michael asked, refusing to be easily dismissed.

"Yes," she said, but then softened her tone as she gazed back at him. "You're welcome to come, of course."

"On the condition that any lycans picked up don't end up like that fellow," he said, gesturing out her door. _Days ago I stood in this room and we talked about basketball,_ he thought wistfully.

Selene glanced over at Kou.

"I can come back," Kou said.

Selene nodded and he left.

"Why don't we let the lycan go? He doesn't know anything," Michael said when Kou was out of earshot.

She made a move to pick up a piece of gun, but grasped a pen instead. "We'll hang on to him until we figure out what's going on. Besides, that's Orbán's area, not mine."

"Look, I'm sorry Lajos is dead. He was a good guy..."

"They _attacked_ us, Michael," she said, turning to face him. "They shot _you_ , and I take that pretty personally. We can't let him go. We have to punish them for what they've done."

She didn't sound like she entirely believed what she said. He didn't press that issue, though. "That bullet was harmless. Something's not adding up, here."

"They were just trying it out. Now that they know an UV round won't kill you, they might hit you with something else."

The maltreatment of Moise reminded him, once again, of the only thing he could think of under the circumstances: loss. He could understand her need to protect him, but the torture wasn't something he could abide. He maneuvered behind her and drew close. The height of the stool upon which she sat was perfect for nuzzling the nape of her neck. He whispered into her hair. "Remember when we talked about the other vampires in my memory of Sonja's death?"

"Yes," her body hummed in his chest and in his hands.

"I recognized one of them as Lord Víg. Did you find out who the rest were?"

In the low light, Michael heard Selene swallow, open her mouth, and take a breath. He rested his chin against her neck so he could feel her speak. "Yes. Léna told me that other Council members were there, plus a soldier named András. Why do you want to know?"

Michael recalled the sting, again, of the whip on his back – applied by the stranger from outside of Viktor's castle. "Are any of them still alive?"

"No," she said, and then recited slowly, "Lord Somogyi died on the train with Amelia, lycans killed András toward the end of the 17th Century, Marcus probably killed Lord Kovács in Ordogház and Léna killed Lord Víg. Why?" she asked again.

"I don't know, really. I must just be curious." She turned on the stool underneath him to face him once again. He turned his attention to the new dream that he'd had and which, he realized, suggested other, unfinished business. "I have another memory from Lucian."

Her forehead abruptly creased. "You do?"

"I think when Marcus threw me down on the wooden post and I died... it dislodged something else from Lucian's memory."

"You're not supposed to have memories in the first place. The bite limits what can transfer to you. Usually it's the other way around and only Elders, or very strong lycans, can drink the blood of another and acquire their memories."

"Nothing is what it seems these days."

"What's in the memory?"

"It's a memory of a part of a conversation that Lucian had with, I guess, another lycan. It just fades in, and Lucian says, 'Emánuel, go, but you know there are no trustworthy vampires.' The other lycan doesn't say anything, and then the memory fades out."

He had Selene's undivided attention. "It's just talking? You have no memory of who Emánuel is and why Lucian was talking to him?"

Michael shook his head.

Can you describe him?"

"He's tall and has long, blonde hair. The clothes looked like 17th Century, perhaps."

She frowned and looked down, but didn't say a word.

"I guess the name doesn't ring a bell, huh?" prompted Michael.

"I didn't make it a policy of learning their names."

"Except Lucian."

"Correct. I just filled them with silver otherwise." She kept her focus downward, but Michael couldn't tell if she was deep in thought or deep in concern.

"I want to know what he meant or even if we can find him."

"You mean to ask him in person?" Then Selene did an unusual thing, especially now. She looked away and laughed, quietly and tiredly. Her abdomen convulsed with the brief expression of amusement – or more likely, irony. Then she found his eyes again.

"Huh? What's so funny?" Michael asked, smiling back at her, if only because of the spectacle of her own laughing.

"Well, Léna might know, or... she might have killed the one vampire who might have known."

"Maybe the lycans know."

"Might."

"How do we get in touch with them?"

"Get in touch... you mean to find Emánuel? They might not be in a talking mood just now, if you'll recall."

"Aside from that, did anybody else have a way of getting in touch that you know of?"

"That's a good question. Other than Kraven and Tanis, I don't know who else might have had back-channel contact with the pack – certainly not the death dealers. Emánuel may be dead for all we know," Selene said as she spun around to go back to reassembling her hardware.

"What if we got in touch and told them the vampires would like to negotiate a truce, for example? With Viktor dead, maybe they _will_ be in a talking mood."

"Which makes it all the more distressing that they're apparently in a shooting mood. I suppose the outbreak of peace on an unspoken signal was too much to ask," she said indignantly. "Unfortunately since they've attacked us, I can't see them being peaceable. I'm certainly not."

"Why don't we just walk into the middle of them? Hoist the white flag?" Michael suddenly became aware of the naïveté of his question, but he didn't care. His newness to immortality gave him all the license he needed, as far as he was concerned.

"We can't just walk over and join them for tea. It's forbidden by covenant and there's this matter of unprovoked aggression against you and Lajos. If they wanted peace, then they should've demonstrated that."

"What covenant? So the only engagement that can happen legally is to kill them?"

"Actually, avoid them, but kill them if necessary," Selene said.

"Or torture them? Is this the 'compromise' authored by Léna and Víg? I can't believe it's still on the books."

"It wouldn't surprise me, but it's what we've got. Either that or let the coven fall apart."

"That choice is unacceptable."

That got him a look. "It's the law. We can't just go running off to do our own thing," she said.

"Even if it's ultimately the right thing to do?"

"I had to accept the laws of the vampires in order to come back to the coven."

"It seems like you should be given some leeway to discharge your duties to do what's in the best interest of the coven."

"I do have responsibilities, Michael, but this is a matter for Council."

"It seems like peace, by whatever means, should be your highest responsibility. You don't want to fight them, do you?"

"No," she said without hesitation.

He drew breath to respond, but she interrupted him.

Her voice went suddenly as hard and as direct as steel. "But I _will_ fight, if necessary."

"I will fight along with you," he said. "But I would more eagerly wage peace with you. You know you don't have Viktor watching over your shoulder anymore."

"And I don't have him to cover for me anymore, either," she said sharply. "I'm no longer one of Viktor's children, but I can't just go off on my own to do whatever I please, if I ever could."

 _Maybe I will,_ thought Michael. "I'm not a vampire. I don't have to follow these rules," he said defiantly.

"You may have to, if you expect to continue to be welcomed here."

"Don't you have some say in that?"

"I'm about as vampire as you are these days, but I accept the coven nonetheless. We would have nothing, otherwise."

  
\--0--  
  
  
Michael went back to the basement, this time to search for Štefan, the archivist, amongst the lingering smells of old documents and burning candles. He didn't immediately find him in his usual haunt in the library reading area. He proceeded in and walked down the dimly lit stacks to an office area. He noticed a large, heavy door standing ajar off to the side. He peered in and found Štefan seated at a small table with papers stacked haphazardly around him. He put down a piece of parchment and gave his visitor a weary look, which naturally troubled Michael. What he would say, he would say with difficulty. "You've found me," he muttered without inflection.

"Is this where you hid when the lycans attacked?"

"I also hide here when other immortals attack. This is one of the deepest parts of the castle, except for the tunnels," he replied, gesturing around him.

"Good to know. What have you found?" Michael asked him.

"Are you going through with this?"

The archivist stood at a crossroads and Michael was determined to budge him off it. "Yes, we'll find a way. What choice do we have?"

Štefan stared back at Michael, as if resisting divulging his knowledge – the exact opposite of his limited experience with Tanis. "I've found what you were looking for," he said finally.

Michael felt a wave of both relief and anxiety wash over him.

"Now, I don't think it was the only way, but a way that Tanis was aware of."

"Go on. Let me have the details."

"Here. I've photocopied the entry for your information. What it says is that you must go to a high clock tower in the city – one that uses Roman numerals in the faceplate – and turn the number five upside down."

"Overturning Viktor...," Michael said.

"Indeed. The exact instructions read: 'Take any V on any clock and pull the mounts except for the vertex so that it falls free. The lycans will track the scent of the vandal and then note the V, if there be any in their party trained to recognize the sign. Return to the altered clock each night afterward and be prepared for reply.' There are no other details or protocols. I suggest, Mr. Corvin, that you let some other vampire besides Selene do the turning. Certainly _you_ must not. The lycans may be spooked if you don't use some other vampire to ascend the tower and touch the faceplate."

"The lycans will know which clock?"

"Any clock will do – the bigger, the better. Do you know one?"

"I think I can find one."

"They'll smell whoever does it. They have a presence in the city, always, despite our best efforts."

"I've noticed."

"When will you do it?"

Michael hesitated for just a moment. "Immediately."

Štefan's eyebrows went up in surprise.

  
\--0--  
  
  
As he began the long walk back to the street level, the Roman numeral "V" spun in Michael's head. Not only did it symbolize the inverse of Viktor, but the family tree of the Corvini. Instead of growing up and apart, the lines grew up and together. The numeral also represented choices, different paths, and divergences. One could choose peace or war, the past or the future, vampire or lycan... _or life or extinction_ , he thought.


	7. The Turning

Michael hadn't gone far down the subterranean corridor outside of the library when he decided to take a detour through the web-like back passages to the hole where the vampires held and tortured Moise, the lycan. To get there, he needed to go underneath the neat rows of suites where the soldiers of the castle made their homes. Vampires that he encountered on this brief journey in the depths, away from more public areas that he was used to, gaped at him wide-eyed in the dim light. In time, he neared the source of the nauseating smell of the violated lycan body. The holding area was deserted save for Moise, still suspended and still suffering the silver embedded in his body. He suddenly wished he hadn't come.

"My doctor," Moise said, and the room echoed his rasp.

 _Too late._ "Yes," Michael said.

After a long, painful silence, the lycan said, "Am I to be released soon?"

"I don't know."

Moise took several long, rasping breaths and then said, "I suspect that I will not make it out of this dungeon alive, but it cost me nothing to ask. If you can manage it, I wish that you could ease my pain – and it does not matter how you do it."

Michael moved to the prisoner's door and peered in through the window in the heavy door. He felt sick at what he saw. He saw something neither mortal appearing nor completely lycan – but something trapped in between. Moise's eyes had gone white above his partially extended jaw. His limbs had changed partially as well – lengthening and becoming leaner, causing him to look like an ostrich with clothes on.

Moise's head lolled and as he peered up at Michael, he said, "It's the least painful way."

"Can you push them out?"

"I would have if I could."

"Let me talk to somebody," Michael said and then walked off in the direction of the armory, elsewhere in a more civilized part of the subterranean wing he found himself in.

Michael found Selene there talking with a group. She held a sword – one that he'd seen mounted on her wall and engraved with her name. He must have had a compelling expression on his face, because she did a double-take as he walked in. She broke away from the group and walked toward him slowly with the sword pointed down. "How is he?"

"Moise?"

"I knew you'd go back to him."

"He's hurting bad, and pointlessly. I wish we could turn him loose."

She switched to a more formal tone and said, "I'll see what I can do." Then she softened again and said, "How are you?"

 _I hurt for him,_ he wished he could say. _She doesn't want to discuss it._ "You're going to love this," Michael said instead.

"What?"

He beckoned her to a corner of the room away from the crowd, but she took his arm and led him into the corridor. "Good idea," he added, and then held up the sheet of paper from Štefan. " _This_ is how we contact the lycans."

She stared at the paper in disbelief. "How did you..."

"Persistence," he said. "I figured there had to be a way. The worst that could have happened was that there was no way."

"Why are you doing this?"

"Isn't this what everybody wants?"

"It isn't as easy as you think."

"This certainly makes it..."

" _No,_ Michael. That's not what I'm talking about. We can't just contact them, it's forbidden." She folded her arms.

"We're not calling them on the phone. I don't know if this will even work."

"We're about to start shooting again, and you want to have a chat."

"Well maybe if we chat with them, we won't have to shoot or do _that,_ " he blurted, pointing a finger in the direction from which he'd come. "Look, if what I have in my head is real – and I think it is – then we have an opportunity. If we can find Emánuel... _this_ might be the peace that we want. You want it, right?"

"Yes, but it can't be us. It _has_ to be done through channels – we need to involve Council."

"Why can't we just..."

"What you're proposing is for diplomats. I'm a warrior and you're a... a... doctor."

"OK, fine," he said softly.

She held out her hand and he obligingly placed the photocopy into it. Then she read it and went quiet. A vampire passed them and she looked at him askance. Then she returned her gaze to Michael. "You need an escort back to the hospital, right?"

"I do?"

"Because of the shooting... because of the danger..." She spoke in the same strange sing-song tone that she'd used when she'd inquired about Samantha – two full moons ago in a Budapest fun house. It must have been the folded arms... or the smell. Then he realized what she was doing.

"Yes, I don't know what they're going to try next."

"You should take a different way – perhaps get off at Astoria station and take the tram."

"That sounds good."

As he answered, she pulled out her mobile, put it on speaker, and pressed a button.

Otis answered. _"Yes, Selene?"_

"Michael needs armed escort."

_"When?"_

She made eye contact with Michael and then said, "In about fifteen minutes."

_"I can do that. Tell him to meet me in the garage."_

She flipped it shut. "Use him. Tell him that I said it was all right."

"Thank you," he said. Then he felt vaguely anxious – for the peace prospects and also that he might be putting both himself and Otis into danger. "What are you doing tonight?"

"Searching for the perpetrators, just like last night," she said, walking backward down the corridor, away from him, back to the armory where he'd found her minutes ago. "Do what you need to do," she added.

He was now a messenger, sent with Selene's reluctant blessing, just as Emánuel had been centuries ago.

  
\--0--   
  
  
Rarely had Michael ventured into the field, on coven business, without Selene. When with Selene, he followed her lead. It had only been recently that he'd graduated from being a third leg of Selene to standing on his own two. His mission with Otis had come more quickly than even he'd anticipated and so he hadn't done any mental preparation. He enjoyed his time with Otis, though. One usually put the time cooped up in a car with someone to good use and came away with a better appreciation of the other, for better or worse.

Like many of Marcus' castle, Otis was a survivor of recent events. His station had risen in the last couple of months as other soldiers died, but from the way he carried himself, Michael wasn't sure the many deaths hadn't affected him. Though Otis seemed to be a competent warrior, he, like most who'd spent their lifetimes in that castle, didn't have the steel core of the death dealers of Ordogház. Just five of those remained from all of the fighting: Kou, Florian, Haruye, Duncan, and Selene.

Otis navigated the streets of Budapest like Selene or the best of Viktor's other shock troops – but after consideration, Michael thought that any immortal could very well memorize a street layout and landmarks without much difficulty. They ditched the car at a public garage and headed for Újpest-Központ station. After a short ride, they changed trains and then got off at Astoria station, as instructed.

"There's the tram pickup," Otis said as they reached the street level.

Michael gazed north, in the opposite direction, where a lighted, architectural oddity stood out above the buildings nearest to them. A spotlight directed his eye to twin towers and then he realized what he saw. _Dohány Street. The synagogue._ He'd been by it previously on foot, exploring the area around the Physiology Institute. "I love you, Selene," he muttered.

"What's that?"

Michael turned back to Otis. "Look up there. Not one, but eight clocks to choose from."

"Do I have to vandalize each one?"

"No, just one should do it – I hope. If you do all eight, the congregants might not appreciate it."

As they walked down Károly Boulevard, Otis studied their destination closely. "If we can get into the courtyard, I'll scale the wall and do one from that side. It should be less public."

"Just make sure your smell is on it," Michael said.

"That shouldn't be a problem."

They encountered tourists and congregants going to _shul_ as they approached. "Shouldn't we be a little closer to civilization?" Michael remarked as another large group of tourists noisily passed them.

Otis shrugged.

Inside the courtyard, Michael craned his neck, but otherwise tried to appear as inconspicuous as possible. He remembered a paperback in his coat pocket and so he pulled it out and tried to concentrate on reading, in the dark, while Otis lurked above. He checked the clock face above him; the time said 8:30 p.m. Twenty minutes later, he glanced up again and suddenly noticed a small black silhouette move in front of the illuminated circular face. The deed reminded Michael of pranks he played as an undergraduate.

Fifteen minutes later, Otis thumped down beside him. Michael spun around and noted that Otis now wore a workman's cap.

"Where did you find that?"

"Somebody left it up there." Then he took it off and tossed it on the ground. To Michael's look he said, "Extra smell. I had to use _this_ to get the number five off!" he said, and held up a sizable knife from his belt.

On the way out of the courtyard, Michael noted the inverted menorah, placed in remembrance of the Holocaust.

During the tram trip to the hospital, he thought again of what the future might bring as a result of his actions. He had no way of knowing whether it would achieve nothing, bring on a lycan attack, or in fact lead to a state of peace between the races. One thing was certain: the status quo was unacceptable.

  
\--0--   
  
  
As they parted at the hospital, Michael had recommended that Otis investigate the cemetery to see if any trail could be found from the assailant from two nights ago. Now, as he stood in a top-story, darkened patient's room gazing out the window toward the cemetery, he regretted it. His eye guided his finger on the keypad of his mobile phone. As he pressed the button, this time to Selene, he ran his other hand through his hair.

"Yes?" she said in the phone.

"I still can't raise him."

"We haven't been able to, either."

"I'm a little anxious."

"Well, you should be."

"I didn't think. I shouldn't have sent him over there."

"He should've known the risks. It's not your fault."

"I think we need to find this sniper guy," he said.

"It might be a she," Selene said. In another time, it would've been funny.

"I think I need shelter in the castle in the morning."

"It's not a bad idea. I'm sending a team to try to find Otis."

"Who?"

"Kou and Haruye, etcetera."

An hour later, Michael ducked outside on his break. He headed toward Fiumei at a jog, dodged traffic, and reached the other side of the boulevard. He easily jumped over the fence to the enormous cemetery and continued in, taking in the night air as he went. Soon, he picked up the stronger-than-usual scent of vampires and tracked the source.

In the dim light, he made out three silhouettes in the distance, hunched on the ground near a cluster of mausoleums. As he approached, he found Kou, Haruye, and Izidor. They straightened.

"Did you find something?" he asked, and then stopped when he realized what commanded their attention.

Otis' dust-covered clothing, shoes, belt, and some weapons stretched out on the ground before them. "He's been dead and gone for some time," Kou said.

Haruye stood with a mobile phone open, pressing rapidly with her thumb. "You called him several times," she said.

He realized that she held Otis' phone.

"Found it," Kou said, and stood up again, holding out a blue stained bullet in the palm of his hand. He blew out a cloudy breath and placed the bullet in his coat pocket.

After a time, they secured the crime scene, silently gathered up Otis' effects, and carried them to their waiting car, parked some distance south of the hospital on Fiumei.

While they loaded the vehicle, a man walking his dog slowed and stared; Haruye shooed him away with a growl. A motorcycle rode by and also braked as it came upon the scene. The driver gave them a good look from behind a full faceplate and helmet and then hit the accelerator.

"We're starting to attract attention," said Kou.

"Isn't he one of us?"

Kou twisted his head around and looked after the departing bike. He shook his head.

"I thought that was a vampire."

"Could be, but doubtful – not any more than the man with his dog," said Kou behind a grin. "We don't have such nice bikes at the castle."

 _It sure smelled like a vampire,_ he thought. "Maybe I've got too much on me."

"You have three live vampires within spitting distance and you're standing near an open vampire car. Smell any _lycans_?" asked Kou.

Michael shook his head. "Certainly not our lycan, but I'm not surprised." _Lycans,_ Michael thought. _How can they shoot at us when we've summoned them for peace? Idiots. Perhaps peace isn't the answer._ Then he considered the field of hulking monuments behind him, the ashes of Otis, the inverted menorah, and the inverted 'V' and decided that war wasn't, either.


	8. Messages

Michael jolted awake to the dulcet tones of Chrissie Hynde. His heart rate jumped from sleep state to thudding in an instant. For the briefest moment, he was back in his residency, going to rounds after just a half-night's sleep, if at all. Selene moved in his field of view, across the suite, toward her bunk. She stopped the music with a finger.

"I didn't know you liked this music," he murmured.

"I don't, actually."

She'd already risen, dressed, and been busy. In the low light thrown off by the clock display and her open laptop on her desk, he could see what she'd dressed in: a tight cotton top and flannel bottom. In his clearing eyes, he then focused on the desk clock: 1300, it said. He propped himself up on his elbow on the cot and watched her go back to the laptop. She glanced over her shoulder to him and then reached for an intercom button on her telephone.

 _"Yes?"_ a female voice said.

"Magda, I need a change of clothes for Michael."

_"I'll bring some up."_

"Thank you," Selene said.

"And thank _you,_ " Michael added.

Selene grinned and then turned her attention back to the screen.

"Anything interesting?" he asked.

"I'm looking at recent Council writs. They've been busy this morning."

"And?"

"You got your wish. We pushed Moise out of the light lock while you slept."

That was good news, but he didn't comment, knowing Selene didn't really share his opinion. "Without silver, I hope. Who went to Council?"

"I did, through Lord Florian."

"Thank you again," Michael said.

"Here's the bad news: I've been instructed to have no further contact with lycans unless it's eradication." She looked at him pointedly.

"Since when did you have contact with a lycan?" he asked through a grin.

"I think somebody ratted on you. Note they said nothing about you, but I'm taking the heat because there's a perception that I enabled it."

"So who complained? Or who retaliated?"

"The complainant is given as... Orbán. Are you surprised?"

"How did he find out?"

"Well, Otis was a warrior of this castle, so Orbán probably made it his business to find out what Otis was up to. Štefan might have said something, too."

"Why would Štefan complain?" Michael asked.

"Maybe somebody just noticed you down there."

He hoped nobody noticed his role in the events leading up to Otis' murder. _I shouldn't have suggested he go..._ "Who can talk to the lycans, then, if any civilized contact is prohibited?"

"I don't know. I still might appeal to Council and explain your situation – maybe it will get Orbán off our backs. In the meantime... let's get away from the castle. What would you say to a walk in the park? We have about six hours before I go on duty."

"It's a date. Where?" he asked playfully, trying his best to conceal his immediate fear. _They'll kill Selene, too._

"Városliget, of course. It's the most public place I know." Then she came over and sat on the cot near him. His smile failed. "I wouldn't feel too bad about Otis. I sent him with you, remember?"

  
\--0--  
  
  
They set out in early afternoon in something unobtrusive but cozy – an Audi A4 from the garage. She'd discarded her black, monochrome manner of dress some weeks ago in favor of turtle-neck tops and denim or dress pants. Her hairstyle had become less ragged and, overall, she presented a smart alternative to her former warrior way. Her new wardrobe was no less pleasing to the eye, as it showed off her curves, especially as the seat cradled her. She brought her usual HK, which she stored in the glove box during travel. When not traveling, it nestled in a holster in the small of her back under her jacket.

In an insulated pouch in the back seat, they brought a .375 liter bottle of blood, which they planned to uncork in the park. On those days together, they enjoyed the things that couples do, like taking boat rides or lazy strolls on the wooded paths. Michael couldn't wait for spring. They'd duplicated this excursion in other parts of the country in weeks past, but this particular journey promised none of the pleasure and relaxation of prior trips. They both kept silent, knowing the seriousness of what they tried to do – against covenant, against 600 years of history, and against all sense.

They entered Budapest from the north on an arterial and then jogged east to pick up the E71. They took the flyover off the expressway and landed on the parkway bisecting the green oasis in the city. Ahead of them, the Archangel Gabriel flew above the Millennium Monument. Before they reached it, Selene braked, downshifted, and turned left onto the Vajdahunyad Parkway. Beyond the namesake castle, they tucked the Audi into a small parking area nearest their favorite spot. While Selene retrieved her HK and holstered it, Michael pulled the bottle out of the pouch and put it in his coat pocket. They found the walking path and turned onto it, hand in hand. In Michael's other hand, he carried two crystals for drinking. He was glad they might scoop out some fun in what they did today.

"What do you smell?" she asked as they walked.

"You."

She grinned. "Besides me."

"Lycans." He breathed in again. "Slightly stronger than usual."

They found a bench along the loose stone pathway and took a seat, facing the lake with the pathway in front of them. She glanced at him, took a deep breath, and blew out a warm cloud. Michael laid a thumb on her shoulder to ease her back to the wood planking. He casually draped his arm across the top of it and laid a hand on her left upper arm. "Still smell them?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, looking out at the lake.

"Let's get out the bait," she said.

He pulled out the bottle, which immediately steamed in the January air. As he pulled the cork, he felt an immediate lift to his senses. "Mortal blood?"

"Yes – 100%, and not synthetic, either."

"I thought you weren't supposed to have this."

"It's ceremonial."

"Where did you get it?"

"You're a bad influence – I never used to break so many rules."

Michael felt his mouth watering. He poured about a cup of the steaming liquor in both crystals and handed one to Selene. Beyond the rising vapor, she looked back at him through blue-white irises, reminding him of her expression just hours ago when they'd made love in her suite in the castle. The simple smell of the broth, like the smell of her, made his thoughts and needs quicken. The smell of mortal blood went into his nose, the sight of her went into his eyes, the sound of her breathing went into his ears, the taste of her went onto his tongue, the touch of her cheek went onto his fingertips, and his loins wanted into her all over again. They parted, clinked their crystals, and took mouthfuls. Then they kissed again.

Ordinarily, at times like these, he would wax poetic. The invasion of blue bullets impacted even that. "Here we are," Michael said softly. "Lajos and Otis are dead, I've been shot, and yet here we are, waiting for a chance at peace."

"Would you rather be somewhere else?"

He looked at her steadily for a moment. "I wouldn't want to do this with anybody else."

"I've never done this with peace in mind. Ordinarily I'd be up high, somewhere, calculating how to isolate them and pick them off without causing brouhaha."

"Think of yourself as a warrior for peace... wait a minute." The air had abruptly changed, jolting him out of his romantic thoughts. A man and a woman approached from their left along the pathway. Despite all of his talk, Michael suddenly felt the changing haze come upon him. Somewhere in his subconscious, he thought things were not right. Through the haze, out of the corner of his eye, Selene watched him, and then followed his eyes off to her left at the approaching couple. The walking man glanced at them, and just as they walked almost past, part of a newspaper that he carried fell from under his right arm. Then he stopped, turned, and reached down to retrieve it.

But Selene had already bent down to retrieve it for him. Michael leaned forward and glanced upward to the man's companion looking on. Selene and the man met each other's gaze as they both reached out for the paper. From his stooped position, the man suddenly said, "Hösök Tere, four p.m., be there, you only. Leave the hybrid." With that, he glanced at Michael, picked up the piece of paper, and walked on with his companion.

After they watched the departing couple for a few moments, Selene turned her eyes toward Michael. "Lycans?"

Michael strove to suppress the chills going up and down – and back up again – his spine. "No, but they had the smell of lycans on them. What's Hösök Tere?"

"Heroes Square – we see it on the way in. The Archangel sits above it." She blew out a sharp breath. "I guess if Castle Víg can have mortals, the lycans can."

"I don't want to wait in the car," Michael said.

"I agree," said Selene. "I should be safe, though. It's still very public."

"There's no sign of our shooter, yet."

"Maybe our shooter knows enough about us that an UV round won't do a thing to us."

"Maybe we just met our shooter."

She pursed her lips and gazed after the now-distant mortals.

Michael looked after them, too. "Maybe they'll try something else. We're taking a big risk. Nobody at the castle knows we're here."

"Don't bet on it. Would you rather just sit and sip?"

He didn't listen. "Look what our friend left behind."

She looked at where he pointed and then reached down to an object resting among the stones. She then held it aloft between her thumb and forefinger: the 'V' from the synagogue clock.

  
\--0--  
  
  
They arrived at the giant square a few minutes before the appointed time. She left him to post guard on the other side of the roundabout. She jogged across traffic to the square and walked toward the center, amongst the crowds of tourists, out in force despite the usual January chill. A voice chattered in his pocket and so he pulled out his mobile.

"Say again?"

_"Keep a nose out and let me know if anything changes."_

"Just the usual lycan smell, for now. They're out and about."

_"I'm going to have a look at the riders."_

She walked on, in the direction of the column that supported the Archangel. Her head and hair moved this way and that as she scanned the crowd. His heart galloped and his body screamed out to be with her.

 _"Anything, Michael?"_ Selene suddenly said to him through the phone.

"I think there's one in the square with you," he said. Then, impulsively, he bolted across the roundabout to her side of it. He took cover at the edge of the colonnade nearest him. "I smell more, now," he added.

She glanced in his direction. _"Really... if they don't know what we look like, our smell gives us away."_ She paused for a beat. _"They can actually smell the blood on our breath."_

"Are you okay?"

_"I'm not used to being lightly armed and surrounded by so many."_

"They all want to see the day-walking vampire," he said conspiratorially. "But they can't have you."

Selene threw a brief smile in his direction and then her face went abruptly dead.

As if by reflex, Michael felt the slight spin of dissociation that warned him that he'd gone into the very early stages of the change again. On a scale of one to five, he'd reached stage one. His fingertips tingled and his eyes itched. All over his skin crawled. "What is it?" he whispered, through failing, changing vocal chords.

_"The one we are to meet. He's in front of one of the statues in the colonnade nearest to you."_

"Yes, I think I see him."

_"He's an old lycan, but not as old as Lucian."_

"How do you know?"

 _"He has heavy feet. I saw him before – brown pants, tan dress shirt, black belt, yellow tie, blond hair and a short beard."_ With that, she abruptly turned away from the riders at the base of the central column and strode across the polished marble toward the stranger. Michael took two steps closer to the corner of the colonnade and peered toward her. She approached a man who stood with his back to her, admiring a statue, or at least pretending to. Michael checked his watch: 1552.

The top of Selene's head reached to about the man's nose – and that was with her heels on. His surprisingly nondescript face, which Michael saw in profile, showed nowhere near the charisma that Lucian had, but he made up for it in besting Lucian in height. Very little chin supported his mouth, making him appear slightly lizard-like. From Michael's fairly close vantage of perhaps 10 meters, he could hear, as well as see, both speak. The lycan didn't turn at Selene's approach, but continued to face the statues. "Who are you?" the man asked in a voice not much louder than a gurgle, but with enough malice to make up for his lack of vocal presence. His voice sounded as if it didn't belong with the face and had been subjected to hours of howling without an opportunity to heal.

"Selene," she said simply.

"What are you?" the man said.

"What do you mean?"

" _You_ smell _somewhat_ like a vampire and you dine on blood, yet you do not die in the daylight. Your friend, the _experiment,_ will be lucky if we do not find him alone and unprotected."

"You dare not trifle with him. He'll pull your head off."

"Hmph," said the man in thought. "We told you to come alone."

"We're alone in front of this statue, aren't we? Besides, you must have an entire pack here."

The man nodded and his eyes twinkled in amusement. "How very appropriate."

"Interesting choice of statue," Selene said. "One of your favorites?"

"This is Mátyás Corvinus. Many of his descendants died before Lucian found your friend Michael."

"That's a pity."

"Lucian failed to do some basic research. This man before me had no Corvinus blood – only shared the name."

"I don't believe I caught _your_ name," Selene said evenly and extended her hand.

The lycan turned around, finally, and looked down at it as if she offered him quiche. His lips pursed. Michael knew that she might throw him across the plaza, but in this public place, they could do little else than simply shake hands and glare at the abhorrent other under the gaze of the Archangel. The lycan took it, eventually, and it struck Michael that it might have been the first handshake between the races in centuries, Kraven and Lucian's relationship and his own with her notwithstanding. Usually the extended hand of a death dealer held a gun or, as Selene showed him recently, a sword.

Even before he spoke his name, Michael knew who it was. The intervening centuries had altered his appearance somewhat, but it was most definitely _he_ who permanently occupied a portion of the memory inherited from Lucian. "Emánuel," he replied to Selene.

"How did you know to come? You could have sent any lycan to meet with us."

Emánuel turned around and faced the statue once more. "You gave the signal that you wanted to speak with _me_. You didn't know?"

Selene stepped forward and stood side-by-side with him then, facing the elder Corvinus memorialized in stone. "All those who know for certain are most likely dead."

"So I've heard," Emánuel gurgled back.

"You killed two of our vampires this week," Selene said for the record, "and assaulted Michael, as well."

"I most assuredly did not."

"One of the pack did."

"One of _us_ did _not_ ," Emánuel insisted. "What sort of ruse is this? Perhaps you would care to explain why there are day-suited motorcyclists on Andrássy Avenue as we speak? You see, you didn't come alone, despite what you say."

Selene abruptly looked over at Michael and then back at Emánuel.

"Don't look so surprised," Emánuel said.

"This _isn't_ a ruse," she stated. "I don't know who those vampires are and that's _if_ you speak the truth."

"Why don't you know? Do you vampires _still_ work at cross-purposes with each other? I suggest that you no longer may be able to safely indulge in that luxury."

"You'll get no disagreement from me," Selene muttered.

"Been a pleasure, Selene.  Give my regards to Lady Amelia, wherever she may be."

"She's locked inside the mind of a madwoman in Brazil."

"Really? I should like to meet her."

"You did, when your pack assaulted Castle Víg last month. She held the crossbow."

"Is that right? With the 'V' turned upside down, I thought she lived, despite what Lucian and Kraven hatched."

"Look, with Kraven, Lucian, and all of our leaders dead, it's up to us to carry this war forward or find something better to do with our time." She took a breath and glanced at the statue before them. " _Neither_ of us has the luxury of continuing the war any longer. That's why I'm here, take it or leave it."

"Talk is cheap, my dear. Those day-suits don't look friendly. Pray that I don't find one of your day-travelers alone in an out-of-the-way place. The daylight is _our_ territory. We don't much like you here."

Selene looked back at Emánuel warily, and then pulled out her mobile phone.

"You can't take my picture," Emánuel snapped.

She gave him an exasperated look that Michael was familiar with. She snatched the art gallery program out of Emánuel's hand and pulled a pen out of her jacket pocket. "So we won't have to go through some of this nonsense," she said, and began writing. "What's your mobile number?"

He gave it to her. She tore off a corner of the program and stuffed it and the pen into her jacket. Then she handed the remainder of the program back to Emánuel. She gave him a parting look and then turned around to walk back toward Michael.

"Hey," Emánuel shouted.

Selene stopped and turned to look.

"Do you still have the 'V'?"

She pulled it out of her jacket and held it before her.

"When you want to start fighting again, put it back on the clock."

She turned back around and shoved it into her pocket as she started walking again. She pulled her hand back out with her mobile in it. As she approached, Michael said, "You know, I didn't get your mobile number until after..."

"We've got a serious problem," she snapped as she walked by, into traffic.

Michael swallowed a retort and chastised himself for his attempt at levity when she had _that_ look – rage.

After they cleared traffic, she began speed dialing as they marched behind the art gallery on their way to the car.

"No peace yet?" Michael said.

She stopped her march to avoid a group of tourists. She glanced at him and swept her bangs away from her face with her phone-free hand. "Not if I keep losing my cool like that. Somebody's sent vampires after us, in suits. Damn. I'm getting Florian's phone mail," she muttered. Then she left a message. "Florian, Selene. I need to know if you or anybody else has sent death dealers to tail us in day-suits. Call me as soon as you get this."

Michael stood by as she rang up somebody else. "Everybody's asleep, Selene," he said.

"Not everybody, apparently," she said. "Hello, Ádám?"

That made sense. He'd imported them from Ziodex to harass the lycans in retaliation for the death of Amelia. They'd gone into general stores once Lady Léna had been ushered out of Europe. Perhaps more had been shipped over, unbeknownst to Selene. Dressed up in a light-tight day-suit, a vampire could venture out in the day and not burn to death.

"Ádám, I need to know if you or anybody else has been shadowing us during the day. Right now, apparently. _No_ , I don't see any. Sorry to have woken you. Yes, tchau."

"Let me guess. He has no earthly idea," Michael said.

"That's right. I woke him up, so it wasn't him or any soldiers from his house. He'll do a bed check, anyway."

"Who the hell, then?"

She shook her head and pulled her sunglasses from her jacket pocket. "I bet we get a call back and guess what – all suits are accounted for and nobody is out prowling Budapest."

"You know, you never did get an answer to why Lajos and Otis died."

"I sure didn't. Why go through all that mind game, then? Maybe they've got their own rogue lycans... or mortals," she spat, indicating the park with her mobile.

Michael watched her eyes think, back and forth, looking for something just out of view.

"At least I have his mobile number so we can bring this conversation up to the 21st Century standard," she continued.

"It sounded like the 'V' signal was something special for Amelia?"

"Bizarre, and with Lord Tanis knowing it, too," she said. "Tanis was just as busy in exile as he was out."

"Let's tackle one mystery at a time."

"Why bring mortals into this mess?" she commented, evidently not noticing the irony.


	9. The Black House

“What’s the problem?  Where are we going?”  Michael put his face into hers as they marched toward the parking area.

“Pick one.  One:  somebody’s sent vampires to spy on us… in day-suits.  That means that I’m going to be in deep trouble with Council.  Two:  these vampires may be harassing the lycans, at least according to Emánuel – something that nobody can afford right now.  Three:  Emánuel is lying out of his ass.  If that’s the case, then he’s not the lycan we expected him to be and we _still_ have a lycan, on the loose, shooting up vampires.”

 _And shooting up a hybrid._   “Selene,” Michael said with a realization coming back to him, “I think I might have something.”

She pressed her phone, again, to her ear.  Who she attempted to call he knew not.  He knew he'd have to fight for her attention.

“…Something worth investigating,” he added.

Her stride slowed as her attention to him quickened.

“There was a motorcycle – a very suspicious one – on the street when Kou’s team came to pick up Otis last night.

“Really?” she said absently, but her expression indicated otherwise.

“Yeah,” he said softly, drawing her in.  “At the time I thought it was a vampire… well, I don’t know.  Kou said he didn’t think so because it was an unfamiliar bike.”

“Did it smell like a vampire?”

“Yes, but…”  Michael didn’t want the recent, gratifying resolution to the foreign memory to become buried by some new issue of mysterious, immortal riders.  He was fairly sure of what he sensed at the time, but Kou had sowed doubt in his mind.

Selene, however, had picked up on the trail that Michael offered.  “Do you have a license tag?” she pressed.

Michael paused before answering.  “Actually, yes.”

“Excellent,” she said.  She then placed another call and stopped in her walk, as if to speak at attention.  “Ah!  Hello, Florian…  Yes…  Yes, you got it.  Well, we have a tag number, possibly, for one of the tails…"  She glanced over and then winked at Michael.  "If I can run down the owner, then we can probably in short order figure out if it’s somebody we know and why they’re up so late… So I need Laudro’s number in Brazil…  Thank you.”  She snapped the mobile shut and then strode forward once more.  “I’m going to give Laudro that license tag number and so we’ll find out, huh?” she said, lifting an eyebrow briefly.  “Florian’s going to text me the phone number.”

Five minutes later, they arrived back at the car in the parking area near Mücsarnok.  She went to the trunk, pulled out a satellite phone, and hefted the handset.  She held her mobile up in her left hand and dialed the number on the satellite in her right.

“Bom dia, Laudro, Selene…  We’re fine, how are you?   I need a hack – can you get into the Hungarian motor vehicle records?  You did?  Great…  here’s a number for you to look up.  I need a name and an address for the owner…  Thank you.”  After a few moments, she said to Michael under her breath, “Pencil and paper.”

Michael reached into the glove box of the Audi and produced a pad.  She relayed the details and he dutifully scribbled down the target’s name:  János Horto.

After hanging up with Laudro, her mobile phone rang.  “Yes?” she said into it.  “I’m fine, we’re just out.  Nothing more on the day-suited vampire sightings.  Reinforcements?  Yes, I suppose just in case.  Here’s the address:  Trézsia Street 3.  We’ll go in first.  Yes,” she concluded and snapped the device shut.  “Florian again,” she said to Michael.  To his look, she added, “He’s sending them out of an abundance of caution.”

She’d left out important details during the phone conversation, but he would not belabor that with her.  Deceiving Florian wasn't something done lightly.  Her report was essentially true, but she daren’t mention lycans.

 

\--0--

 

Her smell, subtly changed with her darkening mood, filled the car as they navigated the Budapest grid on their way to the address provided by Lady Léna’s personal assistant.  Michael fed on her anger, or more accurately, felt angry in solidarity with her agitation.  He’d felt triumphant in finally tracking down the modern-day version of a lycan who’d haunted his memories for two months.  His reaction was decidedly different than when he’d first beheld Lord Víg, who’d been present at the execution of Sonja.  Their immediate mission, however, had now suddenly changed – from meeting a possible peace envoy in Emánuel to possibly rousting a vampire who would confirm Emánuel’s suspicions about vampires.  And still, another lycan, somewhere, carried out some unknown vendetta.

“It could be a mortal and nothing,” he said to break the tension.  Inwardly, he wanted to give the culprit a thumping, if indeed their quarry was the shooter responsible for agitating the lycans.

“I’d just love to know if Emánuel’s telling the truth.  I don’t suppose you would have any insight?”

Michael thought for a moment.  “I guess if I had more to go on, we might not be doing this right now.  We’ve come so far.”

Streetlights popped on as dusk fell, doing nothing for Michael’s mood as they proceeded.  They crossed the Margit Bridge over the Danube and into the western city, ancient Buda, laid out in roads less regimented than its sister on the east bank.  Selene shed her sunglasses and put them in her jacket pocket.  The address turned out to be in the far western part of the city, almost to the city limits, requiring Michael to navigate the unfamiliar, newer streets for her.  After some 40 minutes of driving, they located the address given by Laudro.

In the rapidly dimming daylight, the cottage appeared generally unkempt, with peeling paint, overgrown shrubs, and a driveway invaded by weeds.  The carport was empty except for stacks of junk and mechanical parts.  A discarded motorcycle helmet sat atop a rack of firewood near a side door, which stood resolutely locked.  “A motorcycle lives here,” Michael said as they wandered about the carport and eyed the back yard.

Selene glanced at him and nodded.  “Let’s see who else lives here.”

“You there!” a voice shouted, stopping them. 

They both whirled in the direction of the voice and saw a man leaning out of a window of the house next-door.  Before they could respond, the man continued his challenge.

“He’s out.  What do you want?”

“He’s got something of ours and we’re trying to get it back,” Selene offered in her most authoritative voice.

“Well, he’s got a lot of stuff.  Do you need to get in?  I have a key.”

“You’re a good neighbor,” she said.

“I’m better than that.  I’m the landlord.”  Then he disappeared from the window.

Selene got her phone out.  “Florian, who is leading the team coming here?  Thank you.  I want to wave them off for a bit.  This is a quiet neighborhood and I don’t want to cause any further notice.  I’ll call them if I need them.  Thank you, again.”  She placed another call to Duncan and told him and his team to cool their heels. 

“I’d say we’re made regardless of what we do now,” said Michael.  “We won’t have to kill him, will we?”

Selene glanced at him.  “Depends,” she said, and then deferred further comment as the portly landowner ambled over.  “Thank you.  We appreciate it,” she said to the neighbor.

 _This is far too easy,_ thought Michael.

“I’m glad to help,” the man said, and began leading them out of the carport toward the front door.  Then he abruptly turned back to them.  “Tell me what you’re really here for.  You don’t look like the kind he’s friends with.  And what are _you_?  American?”  He gave Michael a look.

Taken aback, Michael put his finger on his chest in question. _I guess this actually won’t be easy._   Before he could respond, Selene chimed in.  “He owes us money.”

“Suppose you cut me in on some of that and I’ll let you in and forget you were here.”

“Are you a landlord or an extortionist?  I guess there’s no difference around…” Michael said.

“Watch it, boy,” the man said, cutting him off.

“Let’s get out of here.  We don’t have to take this from this sad excuse for a…”

“Let’s just talk to him,” she said in an authoritative purr.  She reached out her hand.  “I didn’t catch your name, Mister…?”

The landlord reached out his own hand to meet hers, and then in a sudden, wrenching motion, she grabbed his lower right arm with her left and rotated it.

Inwardly, Michael cheered.  The man suppressed a yelp of pain.  “What are you, gangsters?” he gasped.

“That doesn’t matter, Mister.  Now, the key?”

The man’s right hand shook under the strain of Selene’s applied torque, but he managed to put the other in his shirt pocket and withdraw the key.

Michael stepped forward and took it out of his hand.  Selene jerked her head in the direction of the front door.  After unlocking it successfully, he returned to the scene in the carport where Selene had forced the man to his knees.  In the near-total dark, she said to him, “Thank you for the key.  Now, go back to your house, pull the blinds, turn on your TV, and forget that you saw us.  If we catch you watching us, we’ll come in and break your arm off.  We’ll hang onto the key.”

The sweaty man nodded and Selene let him up.  Cradling his arm, he ambled off at a considerably faster pace than when he’d originally approached.

“You smell good when you do that,” Michael said to her as she walked by him toward the front door.

“He might call the police on us, so we'd better be quick.”

They entered and examined the house in the dark.  “This is a vampire’s house,” Michael noted.  To her look, he replied, “I can smell it.”  That took care of Option Three perhaps, but Selene’s pungent state of agitation remained high.

“Shit,” she whispered.  After a few moments of walking around the small, pitch-black living area, dining room, and kitchen, she added, “Look at the coverings on those windows.  This house is light-tight.  Let’s take a look at the basement.”

The basement windows, high on the walls, also appeared caulked shut and painted over. They found a well-used bed, which Michael inhaled deeply over.  “Vampire,” he confirmed.

“This is a safe-house of some sort – professionally done.  A vampire could live here with no problem.  I don’t see any coven insignia anywhere, though.”

“I haven’t seen any guns or accessories,” Michael said.  “Looks pretty benign.  The worst thing these guys have done is raise the hackles of the lycans, right?”

She gave him a look of incredulity.  Then her face relaxed.  “Michael, this isn’t a coven property.  It’s not a safe house of Ordogház or anything else.”

“That’s as far as you know.”

“That’s right, but somebody is here… and out _there…_ doing something independent of the coven.”  She pulled out her phone and then held it in her hand.

“Sounds like somebody I know.  So, shall we stay here until he comes home?”

“God, what are they up to?” she said, lost in thought, idly flipping her mobile phone open and shut.  He heard the snapping and the light of the display flashing, but otherwise he registered her presence mainly by sound and smell.

“What are you thinking?” Michael asked.

“Bad thoughts,” she said finally after a pregnant pause.

“How bad?”

Her breath and voice came to him again in the pitch darkness.  “What are these vampires doing?  And how many are involved?  Is it worth our while to investigate?” After a few moments, she added, “Or am I just ignorant of everything that goes on in the coven?  I can go by the book and report this up the chain of command or, on the other hand, I could make a bloody great mess of it, which seems like the only thing I’m capable of these days.”

“Which way gets us killed?”

“Both, perhaps.  The riskiest venture, of course, is to find out the truth.  I’ve already barked up the coven tree… if Florian or anybody knew anything, they’d have told me by now, and that makes me uneasy.”

“We could do nothing,” offered Michael.

“That’s not acceptable.  Could you live with that?  And then we have the other problem of who and why somebody’s shooting at us.”

“I could stay here while you go investigate at the castle.”

“Will you be all right on your own?”

“Yes, I think so.  I think I know what we’re up against.  We’ve got a better idea as of today.”  After he’d been shot at by Viktor’s minions and had torn lycans to pieces with his bare hands, controlling a situation became less challenging than coaxing the truth out of the resident of the house.  Perhaps the truth would be interesting.

Selene’s phone lit up and vibrated, giving Michael a brief glimpse of her worried face.  She waved it at him.  “Just call,” she said.  She considered the incoming number on the display and then flipped the phone open.  “Hello?”  She suddenly straightened.  “Yes, indeed.  Really...  No terms, but I’d actually like to interview this vampire you’ve caught.”  She looked up and made eye contact with Michael.  “Yes, I don’t doubt you now.  Yes, I’ll see you then.”  After she closed the connection, she announced, “That was Emánuel.  Our back channel has paid off.”  She headed for the stairs.

“Caught a vampire?” he said as he followed.

“In a day-suit.”

“Alive or dead?”

“Actually didn’t say.”

“I might be needed.”

“I’d feel better with you there.  We’ll be grossly outnumbered as it is.”  She stopped in the front room, not far from the front door, as if she wanted the rest of their conversation to remain a secret from the world.

“Going to a den?”

She nodded, with thoughts elsewhere.  “I suspect so.”

“You’ll also become official in about two hours.”

“Thanks for reminding me, although I don’t think it matters at this point.  I’m glad you’ll be there, but I need somebody else who I know will keep quiet.”  She flipped the phone open again and pressed a speed dial.  She kept her eyes on Michael as she spoke.  “Kou.  We have a situation and I need you to keep it absolutely quiet…  No, I’m fine…  I’ve learned that a vampire is being held captive by the lycans and they want us to come get him…  I agree – virtually unprecedented.  I don’t know…  That’s what I was told…  Yes.  Good – let’s meet at the entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts at 2030...  Just you.”

“Geez, back to the gallery,” Michael muttered as they went out the front door and locked it.

“I’m itching to find out who’s underneath the helmet,” she said as they approached the Audi and she jangled the keys.

“How do we know this isn’t a ruse to capture us and kill us?” Michael asked.  Inwardly, he felt gratified that there was some contact occurring between the races that didn’t involve shooting.  Selene, if she carried through, would directly contravene a Council writ, while on duty.  This would be no chance encounter at a town monument, but deliberate.  It seemed Selene had decided to make a mess of things.

He smelled the familiar mixed smell of anxiety and determination emanating from her.  When she spoke, though, she spoke with authority, as if doing so would dispel some of her uneasiness.  When her eyes lit on fire, though, all smells became meaningless as fear disappeared.  When her smell disappeared, then he might as well change, too.  She kept her counsel and so he supposed that, in her mind, their safety was an insignificant issue.

 

\--0--

 

They arrived at the gallery and immediately spied Kou standing, with arms folded, on a marble walk in front of the entrance.  He eyed them as he turned on his heel and with them headed for it.  “Together or separately?”

“Might as well be together.  They likely already know you're here.”

Kou harrumphed.  “What do you know?”

They stopped and faced each other.  Michael helped himself to the conversation.

“I’ll have to give you details later.  All you need to know right now is that the lycans captured a vampire…”

“Who?” Kou asked, cutting off Selene.

“No idea.  He – assuming it’s a he – was wearing a day-suit.”

“So I’ve been hearing.  OK, we’ll find out soon enough.”

“Kou, what’s a vampire doing riding around in a day-suit?  I don’t know about it, do you?”

“No, but like I say – we’ll find out, right?  Are we going to see some lycans or are you going to interrogate me?”

“We might see several lycans – I’ve unfortunately been breaking covenant.”  She took a pregnant pause.  “So I have no reason to antagonize you.”

“Except to invite me to break covenant and put my safety at risk, too?”

“You can wait outside, if you want.”

Kou broke into a wide grin.  “Come on, death dealer,” he said and strode off.

“Thank you,” Selene said and rolled her eyes after him.

“Which way?” Kou asked as they entered the gallery.

“He told me to report to the cloak room on the basement level.”

They clattered down the steps along with several other gallery visitors.  Reaching bottom, Michael stopped short.  “There’s somebody we need to talk to,” he said under his breath, nodding toward a man stationed inside the cloak room.

Kou didn’t exactly come to attention, but changed his stance while Michael and Selene approached the cloak room counter.

Selene pulled out the purloined ‘V’ and held it up.  “I’d like to check this, please.”

The lycan stared at the numeral for a moment and then took it.  Then he said, “The gallery closes at 2100.  If, by chance, you are in the Old Masters at that time, security will escort you out via the rear exit for your convenience.”

“Thank you,” Selene said.

At the appointed time, the security guard appeared and did as the lycan had said he would.  But instead of showing them the door, he led them down two flights of exterior stairs to the sub-street level of the art gallery and then back inside at a service entrance.  They followed him toward a machine room, and then through it.  At the back of the machine room another lycan met them.

“Moise,” Michael said.

Selene looked at him abruptly and then up at the imposing lycan, one who now had the distinct pleasure of taking a former captor into custody.

“It’s nice to see you again,” he said, looking mainly at Michael.  “My orders are to disarm and put hoods on the three of you, but I will spare you the indignity so long as you keep the location of this facility under the strictest secrecy.”

“Agreed,” Selene said formally, after a beat.

“Besides,” he said pointedly.  “We already know where Castle Víg is.  I know where your bedrooms are.  Let’s call this a ‘confidence building’ step.”  He looked at each of them in turn, and then turned and gave a large metal panel, bearing no knob, handle, nor lock, several stout knocks.  It opened inward and a pronounced lycan odor sighed out.  The thickness of the cloud, however, could not completely mask Kou’s tension, which had gone through the roof.

They drew a crowd as they stepped through the opening and walked into what appeared to be a fully-functioning safe house for this particular pack of lycans, hewn out of solid rock underneath the Museum of Fine Arts.  Farther in, the passage sloped steeply and darkly downward and out of sight, presumably to join one of the many natural caverns underneath Budapest.  Inside the lair proper, in their immediate view, Michael estimated were over a dozen lycans.  At least one other lycan, identified by its unique smell, was a veteran from Lucian’s garrison and that fateful night of Viktor’s slaying.  Selene’s cred would therefore likely have already been established in this group.

“Selene,” a voice said behind them – Emánuel’s.

They turned around and saw the beckoning, tall man in the same cramped hallway through which they’d just traveled.  They retraced their steps, and then of a sudden, Michael smelled the pungent odor of what must be the captive vampire.  Its anxiety broadcast far and above that which emanated from Kou.

“Visitors are here to see you,” said Emánuel to somebody in a side passage, out of their sight line.

Selene exchanged no greeting with Emánuel, but Michael nodded to him as it seemed some politeness couldn't hurt.  That they weren’t massacred on sight seemed to be additional progress.

Emánuel and one other lycan stood to the side as Selene entered a small room and approached the male captive who was seated in a simple wooden chair. The captive’s eyes, on fire, darted this way and that in disapproval of his captivity.  His eyes settled on Selene and then reacted appropriately and warily, as if his situation might become worse.  He was still clothed in the thick layers of the day suit but the motorcycle helmet had been discarded on the floor nearby.  The vampire did not appear to be restrained in any way, but the guard in the room carried a very large rifle – _loaded with UV rounds, undoubtedly_ , Michael thought. 

The vampire wore his hair shortened almost to baldness and grew an equally short beard.  He had a wide mouth and a somewhat squarish head.  Selene’s body chemistry and the odor that it threw off changed abruptly again – to a mixture of irritation and, something he rarely sensed from her:  intense confusion.  She, of course, reacted to the confusion by becoming angrier.  Her face, however, betrayed none of the emotional turmoil.  What the captive vampire saw was Selene’s focused expression of displeasure at somebody for their simple act of existing.  “Who are you?” she asked simply.

The captive vampire looked back at her and breathed a brief laugh.  “Not a traitor, I can assure you,” he said.  His momentary mirth then abruptly departed when his comment drew no reaction from her.

“Who are you?” she again intoned.  “Who’s your sire?  What house are you from?  Local?”  Then she turned toward Kou who’d appeared in the doorway and leaned against the jamb.  “Recognize him?”

Kou turned his head firmly from side to side. 

Then she glanced at Emánuel, who looked back at her studiously.

“Uli,” the vampire said, drawing her attention back.  “But that’s all you’ll get from me.”

“So you’re not proud of your sire as you ought?  Kou has a reputation for dispatching illegal turns.”

Uli sat back in his chair in seeming resignation.  “You’re even more of a traitor than I thought.”

“It’s the law,” Selene said evenly.  “You know we can’t…”

“I’m certainly not going to tell you anything that will help you and your lycan _friends_ come to call,” Uli snapped as he stood.  “You, who killed your sire.”

She kept her control, mercifully.  Then the set of her jaw changed, which told Michael that she was done with him.  “You know all this ‘traitor’ talk doesn’t impress me like it used to,” she said, shaking away a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her face.

“So you have no honor, then?”

“Since you appear to know who I am, then you must know that I didn’t have a good example.”  She turned at the waist and spoke toward Emánuel.  “You can turn him loose.”

“Why, thank you.  And?” Emánuel said in evident surprise.

Selene faced Uli again.  “I needn’t say it, but I’ll say it anyway.  He’s smart enough to know that if he gets within _our_ sights, then he might find himself in front of Lord Florian, a vampire of _impeccable_ honor and we’ll find out all about him soon enough.  Understand?”

Uli looked back at her stonily, but his odor relaxed somewhat.

“Was he armed?” she asked her lycan hosts.

“Yes, but nothing extraordinary.”

“Let me see the weapon.”  She returned her gaze to Uli after the lycan guard passed the machine pistol, a P99, to her hand.  She ejected the magazine, which was filled with standard bullets.  No funny liquids.  “So, perhaps you’re not an assassin,” she said rhetorically.  She checked the safety and then tossed it back to the guard.  “Run along little Uli and report back to your sire that you’ve caught my attention.”  With that, she turned and gave Michael a pointed look.  _There.  I’ve spared his life, so are you happy?_ the look said.

The lycan guard snorted under his breath in amusement.  The reason for it was not obvious to Michael, but Selene responded by staring the guard down as she left the room.

Emánuel followed her out.  “We need to talk,” Emánuel gurgled and grasped her shoulder.

Instantly, Michael flung him bodily flat against the bedrock wall adjacent.  Selene whirled and stood ready to join him in a close-quarters mêlée if need be.

Emánuel closed his eyes and then opened them slowly at Michael. 

Michael took his clawed hand off Emánuel’s chest and let him stand erect.  As Michael came to his senses, he realized that the whole pack had lined up behind him to maul him to shreds – or at least attempt to.  He gave them a look.

“Selene and I are going to _talk_ ,” Emánuel repeated, this time to his lycan brothers to quiet their murmuring.  “This way,” he said to her.

“He comes, too,” said Selene.  The crowd started to disperse, except for one lycan who shadowed Emánuel.

The three of them went into another room which held several reasonably comfortable chairs and other amenities.  Kou, evidently, stayed behind to keep company with Uli.  They all elected to remain standing.

“We won’t be taking any more prisoners, for your information,” Emánuel said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Selene said.  “But thank you for bringing this one to my attention.”

“So what’s the coven going to do about it?”

“I don’t have a clue who he is,” Selene said emphatically.  “You know it’s the truth that I speak.”

Emánuel jabbed his finger in the general direction of the rest of his followers.  “Moise suffered greatly at the hands of your coven and you’re telling us to simply cut this rogue vampire loose…”

“I’ve had enough of killing and of torture.  Haven’t you?”

“Not when my brothers are being killed in the streets, still!”

Selene smelled surprised once more.  “Vampires are dying, too, but I’m not calling the pack to account.  I called you because I want peace.  It takes work, Emánuel.”

“I don’t see you working very hard.  You have others doing your dirty work:  Kou… Michael… Lord Florian… lycans…”  Emánuel paced and gestured.  “You have no authority to talk peace.  The coven doesn’t even know you’re here.”

“What happened to the man,” Michael interjected softly but firmly, drawing the attention of them both, “who departed from Lucian to meet with a trustworthy vampire?”

“What are you _talking_ about?” Emánuel said with incredulity.

“You were on a mission, but Lucian said that you knew there were no trustworthy vampires.  I know he said it.  I have the memory.”

Emánuel gazed into some distant point, involuntarily.  “That was a much earlier time.  I have centuries of, ah, diminished expectations,” he said, gesturing toward Selene.  “Why _did_ you summon me using the ancient sign?” Emánuel then demanded.

Selene’s eyebrows went up.  “Why did you answer?  Look, we want the same thing, don’t we?”

“What I see is a desperation move from a weakened coven.  This is merely an offer of convenience.  Amelia and her minions came to us a handful of times to make truce with us – for convenience.  Here we are, again.”

“I think the desperate thing is to fight when there are no other options. And believe me, things right now are highly _in_ convenient.”

“Your smell is not as strong in the city.”

“I know that.  But, I am not Amelia.  I’m a death dealer.”

Emánuel walked to a chair, sat on its arm, and folded his arms.  After some moments of thought, he looked up at Selene.  “That you are… or _were_.”  Then he wagged a finger at her.  “But this still doesn’t solve the problem of authority.”

“Let me work on that, OK?” she said.

“Well, _OK_ ,” he said.

“There’s something else.”

“You don’t get any more requests,” Emánuel snapped.

“Will you investigate who is shooting at vampires?”

Emánuel looked back at her without expression.

“Somebody shot _me_ and two other vampires with UV tracer rounds,” Michael offered.  “Perhaps you have the same problem in the pack as the vampires do.”  He stated the facts plainly, but it had the desired effect.

“After you’ve given that vampire in the other room a pass?”

“He’s been warned,” she said.

Emánuel snorted.  “Death dealers don’t give warnings.”

“If he’s not a fool, and I don’t think he is, they’ll get the message that their presence is not appreciated.”

The lycan leaned forward.  “This is my warning:  if another lycan dies, then it’s war.”

“Here’s a headline for you:  vampires are still at war with lycans.  I’m trying to do something about it.”

“So do something about it.”

“I’m holstering my gun.  Why don’t you do the same and try talking instead?”

“ _We_ talk to _you_ about stopping war with us?”

“Why the hell not?”

“Those are kind words, but they ignore realities.  You need to speak with one voice or else our conversation with you is pointless.”

“Perhaps I can arrange a meeting with Council.”

Emánuel snorted again.  "The point being?  If there is dissonance now, how can I expect anything other than dissonance after meeting with your Council?  Can they function without an Elder?"

“We function without Elders and are the stronger for it."

“ _Who_ are the Councilors of this dysfunctional coven?”

“Lords Gellért, Dömötör, and Torma."

"Only three?" Emánuel asked after a beat.

"Lords Gellért and Dömötör would be most worth your while to appeal to.”

“ _Appeal?_   I’m not going to beg for peace.  I’m not a member of the coven who kisses the rings of nobles or a slave who crawls in the dirt to receive grace.”

Selene tilted her head to the side.  “Dömötör and Gellért are sympathetic to the idea of truce, but like all of us they are hamstrung by our law.”

Emánuel laughed and then stopped abruptly.  "Torma is the one that I will speak to.”

"Why is that?" Selene said, patience gone.

"If I can make headway with Torma, then there is hope for you."

"Torma is a moderate."

"I know what Torma is," Emánuel growled.

“He’s old school.  You two would actually get along famously.”

 

\--0--

 

They departed Emánuel’s encampment and processed through the deserted museum in silence after collecting their weapons, as if leaving a church after a Good Friday service.

Outside, in the near-midnight chill, they formed a prayer circle with their foggy breath and Selene made sure to celebrate the occasion.  “We’ll try it this way,” she said, nodding toward the museum.  “But if Uli or any of his friends turn up again, we’ll make them disappear.”

“Aye,” said Kou automatically.

 Incredulous, Michael said acidly, “You were pretty convincing in there.”

She gazed back at him for a beat.  “I’ve had to convince lycans for a lot of years.  But we have to cross that bridge yet, Michael.  But this bunch should make no mistake that they’ve been warned.  If they know us, _at all_ , then they know that we’ll follow through.”

“I don’t believe this,” Michael said.

“There’s reasons that we have laws about illegal turns and vampires outside of the coven’s control, Michael,” said Kou.  “The kind of mischief that they’re up to only proves the point.”

“What?  Hassle lycans?”

“Michael, these vampires have two reasons to back off:  I don’t want them to jeopardize truce prospects and I don’t want them roaming around to cause who knows what,” she said.

“Pretty convincing…” Michael said again, voice trailing off.  His internal rationalizer tried to cut her some slack, though, for at least threatening Uli for a worthwhile reason:  peace with the lycans.

“The key is control.  The coven’s safety depends on it,” Kou added.

“Who controls me?” Michael asked.

Kou nodded toward Selene.

Michael glanced her way and then back to Kou.  “You think so, huh?”

 

\--0--

 

Driving away in the Audi, he argued with her, passionately, but she wore the resolute expression of Budapest bedrock.  “Uli knew what he was getting into,” she muttered, closing the conversation.  She dropped him off at the public garage and he slammed the car door with finality and without a word.  He bailed out his car and headed for his apartment.


	10. Crucibles

In the morning he stood amongst the ancient heroes, in the square, below the Archangel. As the familiar smell enveloped him, he sighted them, clad in dark leather from helmet to boot. They circled the plaza on their motorcycles, after him for an alien purpose. They were different – harassers, pursuers, and terrorists. Around him they went, confining him. With no way out on the ground, he spread his cicada wings and lifted upward. He flew past Gabriel, who gazed stonily down in supervision of perpetual conflict. Michael could do something about this – he could be Archangel Michael, the healer. _I can and I will,_ he could only think, for he no longer had a physical means to speak.

He flew off, leaving his pursuers behind, and in time he found Selene and settled on her shoulder. He knew that he could say something that she might understand. He raised himself up on his thin, chitin covered legs, but he couldn't reach. He would have to try harder. This time he crawled up her beautiful skin to the nape of her neck and then over to her open ear. He crawled over the cartilage and into her ear canal. He knew he couldn't talk before, but he could talk now. He extended his proboscis, stabbed it into the tender, hair covered skin of her ear canal. He drank, but instead of speaking to her, he dreamed her dream and listened to her:

_She came upon a vampire, hapless, in the company of lycans. In her eyes, he was as good as dead, for nothing escaped when the killing haze visited and she decided the future on Viktor's vestigial behalf. She would know the truth – if she couldn't drink it out of him, she would beat it out of him. But... something was wrong. Her jelly-like fists wouldn't land. Her normal, lightning-fast speed slowed to a crawl. "Tell me the truth!" she howled, now the hapless one, because she could do nothing else but speak. "Who is your sire?!"_

_"You are," said Uli._

Then he detached and flew off in search of Emánuel.

  
\--0--  
  
  
Michael awoke and rolled his upper body to bring his alarm clock into view. A new day dawned, but the memory of the prior night cut his brief celebration short. Next to the clock lay his mobile and he lay there a moment, considering it. He drew in a deep breath in preparation for a sigh. He wasn't ready to talk to Selene yet.

He trusted Selene. She and he were on the same side. But Selene, enraged for all the wrong reasons, wouldn't be an agent of peace if destruction was in her vocabulary. Perhaps he needed to distance himself from her so that she would have less reason to react viscerally to things. When something bad had happened to somebody he'd cared about, he simply had sought to make things better. Perhaps he could redirect Selene's energy. Perhaps he needed to go to the source and take matters into his own hands – literally.

He picked up the phone. "I'm sorry about last night," he said into it.

"I'm sorry, too," Selene said. "What are you up to today?"

"I haven't planned anything. I think I just need to be by myself today. You?"

"Figure out who in this coven is creating illegitimate vampires." After some moments of silence, she added, "Listen... Lord Florian has found out about my lycan contacts. I don't know how, but between my phone calls with him – Florian – and perhaps something that Kou said... he's enforcing the writ and confined me to the castle. I'm to have no further contact with them."

"It's good that he didn't take your phone away."

"You could keep a watch on that house we just visited to see who might come and go."

"I've got some other ideas."

"You do? What are they?"

"I can't tell you."

"Michael, what are you going to do?"

"Something maybe very foolish or very brilliant – I'm not sure which. It depends on who you talk to. The less you know, the better."

"Who have you been talking to?"

"I've got to go. I'll see you later tonight."

He folded his phone shut and placed it on the end-table next to his bed. Last night, Selene had tried again to explain the categories that made up the apparent caste system of the coven: low-born, high-born, servant, noble, warrior, maker, and finally, the turned. An "illegal turn", to him, meant simply a law broken while operating a vehicle. For Selene, it was grounds for killing an immortal. She'd gone on at quite some length about what a danger an illegal was – their existence could jeopardize the secret status of the coven. Such vampires lived outside of the reach of the coven's authority, and that simply wouldn't do. She appeared intent on dealing with the issue in the simplest way she knew how. _There must be a better way,_ he'd thought – and had told her so.

He had every reason to despise these same vampires. They threatened peace prospects between the pack and the coven, a more important matter to him than the protocol foul that seemed to preoccupy Selene.

He left his apartment at around 1730 to pay a visit to an internet café, just two blocks away. It wasn't his favorite – on weekdays he utilized one near Klinikák station near the university. Ducking into another, near Ferenciek tere just two months ago, had preceded the pursuit which had ended fatefully in the metro station in a hail of bullets between immortals. Logging in, he saw new dispatches only from his parents, classmates, and assorted old friends. He'd received none from _her_ since earlier that morning, after returning to his apartment with his car. He opened the most recent and reviewed it, now that he'd slept hard on it after being awake for 36 of the last 40 hours, give or take.

On Jan 17, 2004 10:53 AM, Léna Halldórsdóttir wrote:  
Michael,

Yes, we had dealings with the lycans years ago, in the 17th Century and then briefly before that in the 15th. The truces that we had were always short-lived and usually ended when my mother's reign ended. We purified the lycans with fire and then gave them the blade of our swords.

Among us, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that long-term peace wasn't possible. No amount of water could quench the fire. Our coven could only do so much. We must find a new way to defeat our enemy and I believe we've found a way. We've found a way to defeat the sun, as you'll recall. Technology will save us and our might in the markets will sustain us.

You can take Emanuel to Torma to see what will happen. He lives two blocks from Andrassy near the Oktogon. If a new truce turns out to be only temporary, then you will not be disappointed because it's happened before. Perhaps, though, each will see themselves in the other and become the other. Only then will the train of peace arrive. Keep your focus on the big picture. Will we consume each other with fire, shred each other with metal, or wash away in cool water? Will we dwell in the past, paralyze ourselves in the present, or sail away into the future?

Good luck,

Léna  
\----- Original Message ----  
From: Michael C  
To: Léna Halldórsdóttir < lena.halldorsdottir@yahoo.com>  
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2004 8:43:35 AM  
Subject: Re: Memories question

Hello Lady Lena,

My main question is whether these memories of Lucian will keep growing until I get to the point where I'll have his entire life's history in my own head. I remember you had all three Elders and it sometimes seemed that you couldn't control what they said. Will I become this way and if I do, can I learn to live with Lucian inside me? How much of me is really me, now?

Lately I've wanted to meet a lycan named Emanuel who Lucian talked to in another memory that I have. He said something interesting (to Lucian) and made me think that there could be peace between vampires and lycans. So we searched him out and contacted him (I'm probably not supposed to tell you this because contact with lycans is forbidden). He mentioned that he'd had truces with you in the past. How did you arrange those? Also, is there some way that he can talk to Council? You mentioned Lord Domotor sits on it. Do you know if he would be willing to talk to Emanuel? How would Lord Torma react? He spoke of talking to Lord Torma, specifically.

I'm glad to hear things are good in Brazil. I apologize if this note makes you think of things that you don't want to think about or affects you in any negative way. I'm trying to be helpful and end a conflict that seems pointless.

I also apologize for the English. I don't know any Portuguese.

Thanks for answering,

Michael Corvin

On Jan 16, 2004 11:25 AM, Léna Halldórsdóttir wrote:  
Hello Michael,

It's good to hear from you. How is Selene? Are you two still together?

We've not heard from Hungary lately and I suppose that is for the best. The vampires here are still in shock from all of the deaths and especially that of my mother. Lord Domotor sits on Council, but I've been catching up with my business. I preoccupy myself with the business of the coven and believe it or not, there is still work that needs to be done. There are assets that belong to us that we've not been able to fully get under our control.

I don't mind questions about my memory, so ask me what you want. If I don't want to answer, I'll just not answer. The Elders are still very much present, but I treat them with respect and not tempt them. I kind of miss them, though, and I certainly also miss Hungary.

I'm sorry you have the memories of Lucian. I hope we can do something about that. Say hello to Selene for me and give her my regards. Tell her I don't have any hard feelings and I realize that moving back to Brazil was probably the best thing. I'm better here, but I would very much like to come back someday.

Léna  
\----- Original Message ----  
From: Michael C  
To: lena.halldorsdottir@yahoo.com  
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 8:23:20 AM  
Subject: Memories question

Dear Lady Lena,

How are you? We are good, except we've had a few shootings of vampires lately.. We're trying to figure out what's going on because things had been pretty quiet since they attacked Castle Vig.

I hope I'm not intruding and I hope it's not too soon after what happened. I wondered if you'd be willing to answer some questions about your memory. You remember that I have some from Lucian.

Anyway, if you can't answer because it's too soon or you just don't want to talk to me, I understand.

Sincerely,

Michael Corvin

 _Why not?_ Michael thought. He left the café and walked west for two blocks to József Boulevard and the tram station there. He took the Number 6 to Oktogon and from there made his way via public transport back to the Museum of Fine Arts. He reported to the cloak room, hoping to find a familiar lycan there. Disappointed, he helped himself to a brochure and found a floor plan within. With it, he found a stairwell that led to the basement. He retraced his steps from last night, when he, Selene, and Kou had paid the visit to Emánuel's lair. His nose led him to the correct door in an out-of-the-way place in the machine room, but he found no guard or any other outward sign that behind this particular door lay the entrance to a nest of lycans. He stood there, dumbly, not knowing a right way to proceed. _I'll huff and I'll puff and I blow this door down._ Then he made a fist and gave the door a stout rap with a force and resulting clunking noise that only an immortal could manage without tools.

After a few moments he heard, very faintly, a shuffling behind the door but it didn't open. He assumed the attitude of a cat listening for a mouse. He tried something else. Making a fist again, he banged the door once at five points along a large, invisible, upside down 'V', ending around his right foot. The door opened abruptly. Two muscular hands grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him over the threshold. Before he had time to think, his claws had extended and pushed their way into the flesh-covered ribs of the being who'd dragged him into the lair. In the dim light, he saw a face that he recognized: Moise. Beside him, several other lycans pressed in with weapons drawn.

"The next time you need to come, do it through channels!" Moise hissed at him. "And kindly retract your claws."

Slowly, Michael did so as both men unhanded each other. "I'm sorry, I knew no other way," Michael replied quietly, but not enough to silence the sarcasm in his voice.

"Where is Selene?" Moise growled.

"Never mind her. You need to deal with me right now."

"What do you want?"

"It's nice to see you again, too. I want to see Emánuel."

"He's not available. What do you want with him, I say?"

After some moments of pointed staring, Michael said, "I want to take him to see a coven Councilor."

"For what?"

"To see if peace is possible."

"Oh, that," Moise said absently.

Michael then had an idea. "And if you still have Uli captive, alive, I would like him released to me... as a reciprocal 'confidence building' step. That is, if you have no further use for him."

"He knows something, but he will not say."

"Then release him."

"You will take him to Selene?"

"No."

"We were very surprised at her treatment of him, but considering my first-hand experience with vampires, maybe I'm not so surprised, huh?"

"She plays no favorites. If you do wrong, you hear it from her."

"Her reputation precedes her. So, Dr. Michael? Now, what else can I do for you?"

"Tell Emánuel that if he would like to speak to a Councilor, he should meet me at the Oktogon at 2100 tonight."

"Alone?" Moise said, with a slight shrug.

"It's your choice – really."

"Yes, really," Moise said after a few moments' reflection. "Considering the wayward vampires about, we'll likely come as a group."

"Fine, but probably only one will be allowed to enter the Councilor's mansion."

"I think we'll hang on to the vampire, then. If there's any funny stuff, we'll execute him."

"Fair enough. I hope I won't be disappointed," Michael said. He eyed the assembled lycans briefly as he turned to leave and then showed himself out.

  
\--0--  
  
  
An eight-foot high stone wall protected Councilor Torma's mansion on a corner lot of the city. Within, a hedge lined the inner walls which in turn bordered meticulously landscaped grounds. It reminded him of the attention paid to the appearance of Ordogház, but on a much smaller scale. Michael walked through the garden, up the steps to the front door landing which was decorated with potted plants, columns, electric torches, and statuary. A heavy-lidded mortal opened the door at his approach. Behind the butler, a vampire stood in a three-piece suit with arms folded – no doubt a soldier of Torma's house. On his lapel he wore a vampire helix pin. "You must be Michael," he said in greeting.

"That's right," Michael replied, scanning his surroundings.

The soldier tensed and gave the visitor behind Michael, still waiting on the street, a good, hard look. He pulled a mobile phone from his jacket pocket and held down a button. "One lycan and Michael," he noted into it.

_"Bring them in. They came alone that we can see."_

"I'm Csaba," the soldier said. He motioned to Michael to come inside.

Michael heard additional footfalls behind him and turned his head to the side to glance back toward the open gate to the street. Two other soldiers in street clothes stepped out of pedestrian traffic and entered the walled sanctuary behind Emánuel. The lycan kept his gaze forward as he walked – he probably needn't actually see them to know they were there. Moments later, Michael and Emánuel stood together in the small vestibule that doubtless also served as a light lock when needed.

Within, somewhere toward the rear of the main floor, he heard a door squeak closed and other beings approaching on solid wood flooring. Two other soldiers arrived, one carrying a handheld metal detector. The soldiers checked them; Emánuel had come unarmed, though the detector registered small pieces of metal on his body. Afterward, Csaba waved them into the foyer. Michael then saw a well-dressed man enter a nearby, small sitting room through a side hallway, accompanied by yet other soldier. As Michael and Emánuel walked in to join him, he took a deep breath and said simply, "Welcome."

"Thank you, Lord Torma," Emánuel said formally.

Torma wore the look of a concerned man, but one who had grace enough to be polite anyway. He had a thin pate and seemed rather old looking to be a vampire. He had heavy, prominent eyebrows which knitted together in response to the lycan who occupied his sitting room. "It's been a long time, Emánuel. You've been well?" he said stiffly.

Michael looked at each in turn. _Of course._ "You two know each other?" he said, stating the obvious.

Torma regarded him and nodded slightly. "Before this," he said, indicating the room around them, "I lived as a noble in the castle of Lord Viktor." Then he turned his attention back to the gangly lycan gracing his presence. "Emánuel lived there, too."

"I was distressed to hear of the great loss of life at the hands of Lord Marcus," Emánuel said next.

"There has been much regrettable loss of life," replied Torma evenly. Then his eyebrows lifted suddenly. "Why don't we all sit?"

The sitting room featured two chairs on opposite ends of a long, low, ancient table. Emánuel took one and Torma the other, so that they faced each other across it. Michael sat at a divan along one wall, so that Emánuel sat on his right and Torma to his left. Their knees rested scarcely four feet from each other in the intimate space. The chair in which Emánuel sat proved to be ill-suited for his two-meter-plus frame; his knees protruded higher into the air than the rest of them. "It looks like history is being made here," Michael said, leaning forward.

"Don't get too excited, Michael," snapped Torma, keeping his eyes on the lycan.

"There are many issues to discuss," said Emánuel, with a flash of fang.

The butler appeared at Michael's right shoulder, saving him. "Blood, Messieurs?"

All nodded. "Perhaps it's best to proceed with a clear head," observed Torma. "Did you have anything in particular that you wanted to discuss?"

"I am willing to discuss anything, but I am here simply to meet you. We agreed to this meeting only in the last hours. I daresay, however, that our meeting has been productive, even historic, wouldn't you agree?"

Torma nodded.

"It's good that we can once again be in each other's presence as vampires and lycans without tearing each other to shreds," the lycan continued.

Torma sighed audibly. "Yes, indeed."

 _Or as unequals,_ Michael thought. The butler returned with a loaded silver tray. The room fell silent as he distributed the drinks. Once served, they hefted their silver chalices.

"To a hopeful future, for both of our races," Torma continued, seemingly without anything better of substance to say. Michael suspected he had much to say but daren't say it. He wore an expression as if he didn't like the taste of this shared blood.

"I'll drink to that," croaked Emánuel.

"Cheers," muttered Michael. _But it's a good start._

"The last time that I was in your presence, Lord, I bowed at your feet," said Emánuel, putting his chalice down in front of him.

"We have survived, and that is no small thing," said Torma after a silence.

"Yes, and despite Lord Viktor's best efforts," Emánuel stated, glancing at Michael, "but I learned some time ago that Lord Viktor and the rest of the coven leadership have perished."

"That is true. Our institutions, however, carry on, despite our reduced numbers."

"Is he, truly?"

Torma glanced down at his chalice and thought for a moment. "Many of his loyalists and policies survive."

"I see." Emánuel took another sip and gestured around the room with his chalice. "And I see you still live comfortably."

"It's a tribute to the efforts of vampires like the death dealers and our other warriors. Without them, we wouldn't survive long. They, likewise, need our resources to provide them with shelter and a respectable standard of living. It's a relationship that I gather most, if not all, find agreeable."

"I am told that the coven is now governed by a "Council of Three". Is this information accurate?"

Michael noted in his peripheral vision that Torma glanced at him once again. "Yes. We are elected by the coven. There is also a lower Council." Then he continued, deliberately, "How are things in the pack since Lucian died?"

Emánuel chuckled deep in his throat. "We have always been a collection of loosely associated packs, but we all swore allegiance to Lucian. Without Lucian, we still remain similarly associated."

"You have no single leader?"

"Some of us are of the opinion that we've never had one and never needed one, though Lucian claimed to speak for all of us as he led our struggle centuries ago. Bloodshed continues to this night, in fact," said Emánuel.

The temperature in the room abruptly dropped. "Indeed?" replied Torma. "I'm not aware of any battles."

"These aren't battles. These are _assassinations._ It's as if Viktor still lives," Emánuel hissed.

"I'm sorry, but you are mistaken," Torma said, glancing at Michael once again. "Unless done in self-defense, engaging the lycan pack is forbidden by our covenant."

"Since when?"

"Since the assault on Castle Víg. You could say that we got your point."

"We presumed you did get the point, but evidently some of you did not." Emánuel then leaned forward slightly and put his hand inside of his jacket. He stopped all his movement upon the sudden appearance of Michael's generous nails. Emánuel pursed his lips and then continued the motion more slowly. He withdrew something in his fist, stretched his arm out, and released the contents – a dozen silver slugs, encrusted in dried blood, dropped from a cloth pouch to clatter noisily onto the coffee table.

Torma nodded to Michael, who kept a steady eye on Emánuel as he leaned over and picked up one as his nails retracted. "These look like .50 caliber," Michael said. He'd removed several from bodies in his time at Trauma Hospital.

"Who from?" Torma asked.

"I'd hoped you could tell me. There are vampires in this city who apparently are unaffiliated with the coven, if I believe what you describe."

"I don't know," Michael said. "I'll have to check to see who might have .50 cal'."

Silence ensued for several moments, and then Torma snapped, "Now would be a good time to do that, please?"

Michael looked in the direction of Torma and then got up. He withdrew his phone, went to a room on the opposite side of the foyer, and pressed Selene's speed dial button. A soldier stationed in the foyer kept him within his sight.

"Yes, Michael?" she said to him by way of greeting.

"Do you know who in the coven might have .50 caliber pistols?"

"That's a big cannon. Why?"

"That's what our vampire friends have apparently been shooting up lycans with."

"Where are you? How are you finding out all this?"

Michael debated a lie, and then decided otherwise. "I'm at Councilor Torma's mansion with Emánuel."

"You're _what?_ "

"I'm just keeping the process going, Selene."

Selene was silent for several moments on her end as Michael paced in the larger sitting room that he found himself in. "How is it going?" she asked.

"So far, so good. We're drinking blood, not shedding it. It's tense, but civil."

"That's a relief," she said..

"You're very quiet."

"Sipping blood in a Councilor's mansion is the last place I expected you to be tonight."

"Jealous?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. I wish I could be there."

"I've got to get back to the meeting."

"How did you find out where Councilor Torma's mansion is? Who have you been talking to?"

"I'll tell you over breakfast sometime."

"You're very mysterious lately.  I think we ought to have a chat about it."

Michael didn't want to go there just yet.  "You're probably right," he said, in an effort to short-circuit her.

"Give me a call when you're through – or better yet, just come to the castle."

He returned to the sitting room after hanging up. The lord of the house and the lycan sat quietly while the white-gloved butler busied himself cleaning up the scattered metal and bloody crumbs. The slugs made a tinny clunking noise as he deposited each on the silver serving tray. After he collected the bullets and the drained chalices, he left the room and Michael returned to his seat. "You never answered Selene's question from yesterday," he said to Emánuel.

"What question was that?" he said abruptly with irritation rising, according to Michael's nose.

"Two vampires were killed in the field – with UV rounds. Who's doing it?"

The lycan's irritation intensified. "I don't know anything about that, as before." If he was a liar, he was a damned good one, Michael thought. He exuded confidence without a shred of defensiveness or deception. Emánuel continued, waving a curved finger at Michael, "And it's clear from our conversations that you don't know who the riders in day-suits are that we've been encountering."

"But we know enough that they're illegally turned, unfamiliar vampires," Torma said, giving Michael a concerned look. Then he turned off his scowl and turned his attention back to Emánuel. "We're just full of denials tonight, aren't we?"

Emánuel sat back in his chair. "It would seem that before we proceed with additional meetings to discuss topics of mutual interest, perhaps a reality check is needed. At least one of us, obviously, needs to get their house in order."

Torma gave Michael yet another accusing stare. _I'm not responsible,_ Michael said back to him – silently. "I, too, would like to meet again, but perhaps we should wait until things are less chaotic."

"The goal of which, and I assume that you would agree, would be to discuss a permanent, peaceful solution to our conflict," Emánuel said, rising. "Chaos is not useful to any of us, as many of us have concluded after 600 years of hostility."

The other immortals also rose, and Emánuel offered his hand to Torma, as if challenging him to take it.

"I suppose we shall meet again," Torma said, taking it after an interval.


	11. Deceptions

Lord Torma's bodyguards ushered the pack leader to the front door and out. Michael remained seated on the divan and watched through the front window as Emánuel strolled down the walkway to the perimeter wall, donning a cloth cap and hunching his shoulders to ward off the cold. Beyond the wall, he turned and blended into the world. _Just as a mortal would,_ Michael thought.

"You could say I was present at the creation," Torma said, interrupting Michael's thoughts while seemingly lost in his own. "I remember a time, so long ago, when vampires and lycans could, if not sit and have a chat, coexist without engaging in mutual slaughter."

"As master and slave?" Michael said.

Torma continued to gaze into the night through the window of the sitting room to his left. "Yes. Lycans have only ever been slaves and adversaries of us."

"But the situation's changed, hasn't it? There's no longer a need to rip each other to shreds."

"Yes, we _are_ 'making history', Dr. Corvin, but we are also revisiting history. Vampires and lycans together and not fighting: it will be, perhaps, more challenging to sit with them than to annihilate them." Torma stared out the window anew. "We are so very different."

"I don't share your perspective," Michael muttered.

Torma seemed to ignore him. "There were nights when I had Emánuel whipped. Then Lord Viktor dragged this coven into our great conflict and we proceeded to whip the lycans, collectively, for six centuries."

"To what end?"

"We _survived_ , Dr. Corvin."

"So, that's considered 'right' in the eyes of the coven?"

Torma rounded on Michael. "What's _right,_ Dr. Corvin – what's _right_ is what assures our survival. What is this meddling that you do, child of Selene? Are you not a physician? You appear to have nothing to gain from what you're doing in the coven."

"I'm not doing this for _you_ ," Michael stated. "I am trying to do what's right," he managed more softly. "I'm not a _child_ of Selene and I don't want somebody that I love to die. I suppose I don't want others that people love to die."

Torma seemed taken aback and smelled it. He gaped at Michael and said, "That is, I guess, noble and not a foolish thing to think."

Michael ignored the disguised mocking. "It's the truth."

"Fight for what _you_ believe is right, of course, if that is what you want to do. We fight... endeavor to assure _our_ self-preservation and fight anything that acts in opposition to it. You would do well to remain on the right side of that."

"What if vampires act in opposition to what's right for the coven?"

"It wouldn't be the first time." Torma's eyebrows raised briefly and then his expression softened. "Emánuel is correct, you know. Now that the Elders are no longer with us, slaughter isn't necessarily the order of the day, and since we are under more democratic auspices, things are less clear." With that, he stood – an unspoken signal that Michael's visit was over.

"Did you know Sonja?" Michael said softly, standing. By his count, he'd met just three who'd known her. He cursed Lucian for giving him only a memory of her ashes. He had no recollection of Torma among the witnesses to that horror.

"Yes, I did," Torma said simply. "I escaped, along with several others, the subsequent onslaught by the lycans. I don't often speak of those days," Torma added.

"Perhaps you should. You might see that you survived the actions of your own coven." With that, he put out his hand to shake Torma's. "When do you think you'll talk to the lycans again?"

Torma took it. "Well, Dr. Corvin, it's just one lycan that I'm talking to. By his admission, they do not speak with one voice – just like the vampires. Perhaps when things become less _messy_ , we can talk again."

Csaba appeared in the doorway of the sitting room and extended his hand in the direction of the foyer. _What better time is there than now to talk?_ Michael wondered as they moved to the foyer as a group. Despite what Torma implied in his last comment and Torma and Emánuel's promises, he didn't have much hope that would continue their conversation. _Selene means never again... or does it? The light would not burn her as it had Sonja, but that wouldn't stop her from burning others who stood between her and her goals._

In Michael's silence, Torma continued, "I'll be in touch with you, or Selene, if I feel a need to communicate with Emánuel."

As Torma gestured, Michael heard a moderately loud _crack_ behind him and then suddenly felt burning pain slam into his upper left arm. _Not again._ He grasped it with his other arm and began to turn around. Csaba and one other vampire, who'd been standing near the entrance, suddenly rushed forward, flung the double doors closed against the elements and follow-on attack, and drew their weapons.

"Mirielle, what was that?" Csaba said into his mobile phone as Michael braced his legs to try to keep from sinking to the floor.

 _"Sounded like a shot,"_ a female voice said in response.

"It definitely _was_ a shot," Csaba said, looking at Michael. "Check the grounds for somebody who doesn't belong. My Lord, are you hurt?"

"No," Michael heard Torma say. "Dr. Corvin?" The piercing pain radiated with such intensity that he sank to the polished stone on one knee. "Do you need help?" Torma asked insistently.

Through the fog of the change and the pounding of his pulse in his ears, Michael noted that another vampire knelt by him. Between ragged breaths, Michael gasped, "It's UV."

"Get a knife from the kitchen," Torma snapped to somebody nearby.

"Here," Csaba said, and knelt next to Michael as well. Through his peripheral vision, Michael saw that Csaba wielded a multi-tool with a knife extended. "I think it ricocheted off the door jamb and it slowed down."

"Lycans probably aiming for my head, vampires," Torma said. "I think we might have solved our mystery as far as I'm concerned."

Michael barely registered the conversation and instead concentrated on blunting the pain and driving the slug back out. After some minutes of agony, he and the vampire soldiers of Torma Mansion succeeded in extracting it. As his senses returned, he replayed the hit in his mind – and it was hard to avoid coming to the same conclusion that Torma evidently had: the lycans had taken advantage of Emánuel's visit to try and assassinate a Councilor. It wasn't, after all, unprecedented.

  
\--0--  
  
  
Michael could feel and smell a palpable change in the mood of the castle. Where previously he'd detected exhaustion behind the cold stares, now he read calculation and determination – hallmarks of death dealers. The vampire warriors who gathered in the café didn't speak to each other or pay him much mind, either. They prepared themselves for imminent battle and the prospect of death, in effect, challenging death to come and take them – the death dealer way.

A tall, broad-shouldered vampire with sandy hair stood with a small group in the café – Ádám. They planned a big operation – that was the only explanation he could think of for Ádám's presence among them. They would need all the vampires they could get from outlying mansions to clear the lycans from their lair.

He both heard and felt the vibrations coming from weapons discharging below. He went back into motion and after descending to the deepest part of the castle, three flights down into solid rock, he made his way to the armory and the firing range. Arriving there, he found Selene talking to Kou, Florian, Haruye, and Duncan over a table of maps and schematics.

After a time, she noticed him and came to him. She put an arm around him as they walked out of the armory and made their way to the library corridor. Above them, now, he heard the muffled thumps of the castle's shutters closing to mark the dawn. In an infrequently traveled alcove, they stopped and faced each other.

"When's the raid?" Michael asked.

She looked up at him and shook her head to get a clearer look at him through her bangs. "Tomorrow night. Tonight we're drawing up the assault plans."

"What did Torma say?"

"I don't know. They've taken a vote, and Council has instructed us to destroy Emánuel's lair. You've also received commendation for intercepting the bullet, but I've also heard of some grumbling around the castle that you led the lycans straight to Torma. The whole castle is in an uproar."

"I guess that was the intent," Michael said. He changed the subject. "Come on. I should show you who I've been talking to." He took her to the library computer room, sat on a stool, and logged into his e-mail. He fetched the message thread that he'd exchanged with Lady Léna and let Selene read.

Her eyebrows flew upward as she stood next to him. "Michael," she said in alarm, "do you think Léna is responsible for Uli and the rest?"

"What's her motive? She notes the invention of the day-suit, but it doesn't look like, to me, that she's causing this chaos. She's much too far away and, if you ask me, rather distracted."

As he spoke, she slipped behind him and pressed her body to his back, wrapping her arms around his chest. In awhile, these large, strong hands that caressed him would undoubtedly wrap around automatic pistols intending to wreak havoc. He could hear it in her voice and in his memory. For a moment, he was transported back to Ferenciek tere station and the guns' assault on his senses. He'd seen the result of gunplay on human bodies but had never personally experienced the commission of the act until Ferenciek tere. He could understand why people developed PTSD.

"They're definitely letting you out?" Michael asked softly.

"This sort of operation is one of my authorized activities," she said into his ear with a hint of sarcasm. Then she whispered, "...But I'm not participating in that raid."

He turned in the direction of her voice and found her eyes mere inches from his. "What are you going to do?"

"What I'm going to say, you must keep secret: I'm going to go out on an errand this evening, ahead of the raid, but I'll be going to the Horto house in Buda to wait for our vampire, János, – if he _is_ a vampire – to return. And when he does, I'm going to question him."

Michael felt momentary alarm, but then dismissed his objection to Selene's brand of questioning. He wanted as much as anybody to get to the bottom of the mystery of the riders who threatened truce prospects. "And?" he prompted her.

"Perhaps we'll get some answers. Right now we've got plenty of rumors and assumptions but precious little from the most important immortals involved." She broke eye contact, then, and lost herself in thought. "And now we're going to raid a lycan hideout and in all likelihood reignite the war." Her eyes then returned to his.

"So look who's being secretive?"

"I think a vampire... or vampires... in this coven, perhaps in this castle, are in Uli's camp," she whispered into his hair behind him.

"Who? How do you know?"

"I don't know. It's one of those assumptions. Think about the Council writ and Florian's orders to keep me inside. I also have my suspicions of who it is, but I'll keep that to myself. Maybe I'll turn up somebody useful at Horto house." Her eyes lost focus again. "What if I'm wrong?" she suddenly asked.

Her lack of self-assurance took him aback. "What? You're thinking it might really be lycans out there who are trying to kill us? After what Kraven and Tanis did, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that there are vampires out there who would try to kill their own kind."

Her body responded to the name by emitting a pungent aroma of seething anger.

"I asked him point blank, Selene. He doesn't know anything about any rogue lycans."

More anger and confusion. "That doesn't prove anything," she said, almost in resignation. "I'm about to turn in," she then said abruptly.

"Me, too," he said dryly.

"Give me an hour." She put a hand on his shoulder and then left.

He would allow her that – anything to get her to calm down. After an hour, he logged off and went to her suite. He resolved to get her mind off lycans. Denial had set in – evidently the notion that the coven hadn't purged itself of vampire killers was too much to bear.

  
\--0--  
  
  
Michael felt clammy and slippery. Selene was near, but how near he couldn't say. He rested within something organic – something that pulsed with life. He thought it comforting, but was at a loss to say why. He came to, but he couldn't tell if sleep or the hybrid released him. In both conditions, reason returned to him gradually. He reached out to the wall of the organic sac that he found himself in – he discovered a strangely shaped rib cage, an abdomen, navel, and two breasts. Upward he found collarbone, a familiar mole, and then an armpit. The arm above it was strangely shaped – thin and strong and sprouted stalks of cartilage in a branching pattern with skin in between, like giant leaves. The leaves sprouted from a body as if wings, which he now realized enfolded him in a warm, living, cocoon of some sort. _Selene?_ Wanting to know more, he arched his back to push out of the wings to see outside of his world.

He emerged into a fall day, resting with her on a bed of leaves on a slope of a wooded hill. At the top of the hill stood the still-burning ruins of Castle Víg. He struggled to his feet and the pale, winged apparition near him also rose. "Selene?"

"Yes," she said, staring into him with black eyes with no whites. She turned and glanced up the hill and then back. "I think we bit each other too much, Michael."

Then Michael awoke as the bunk bumped in the dark – no Selene wings furled around him. He looked over where Selene sat, hunched over on the edge of the bunk, rid of her nightmarish physique. Her shirt had ridden up, revealing bare skin and the bumps of her spinal column down her lower back. _So mortal._ A small light bathed her unkempt hair in blue along one side of her face. Her smell revealed agitation and anger. As his mind woke up he realized that she had her mobile phone out and pressed to her head.

"What the hell was that about?" she hissed into the light, barely controlling her voice. "Taking a shot at Lord Torma? Didn't you read the paper? This is important! I don't know what game you're playing... But it's _deadly,_ and there's no point in it. All that's going to happen is continuous war... You've got to stop this madness. I thought I could trust you... We took you to his house!" Then the light winked out with a snap, leaving a reduced glow from the outside display.

Michael reached out and traced a finger down the back of her wingless torso. "You waited until now to fuss somebody out? Who was that?"

She got up and said simply, "Go back to sleep, Michael."

"Who can sleep after that?" _And that dream..._

"I'm taking a shower." Then she stripped, releasing more of her telltale smells. She went into the washroom, trailing a plume of fury.

After the water turned on, he picked up her phone and played with it, in a mind made uneasy with things he didn't know. Who had she spoken to at 1525, in the middle of the day? Somebody familiar with the incident at Torma's manor, certainly, and by extension with one who'd recently wounded him, perhaps for the second time. Where was Selene going, exactly – and would she really interrogate a vampire? He thought of the reaction of Uli when confronted by Selene. _Traitors,_ he'd said. She hadn't killed that vampire and he'd found out later that the lycans hadn't put him to death, either. What was it about Léna's e-mail that puzzled him? She'd stated that vampires had found a cure for sunlight – was that cure Selene? Then he remembered his dream from yesterday afternoon. Why had he dreamt it? He'd nibbled on Selene's ears any number of times and had drawn blood at other times. Could he have picked up something, perhaps a stray spark of memory, which held a secret meaning for the mysterious appearance of Uli?

He awoke again to see Selene standing over him with smell hidden behind soap and skin obscured behind the Corset of Amelia. She gently plucked her mobile phone from his sleepy hand. Surprised, he sat up in the bunk to get a better look at her. She'd donned the clothing that he couldn't separate from death and destruction – specially designed and made from a material that shielded the wearer against detection by smell.

She turned from him, silently, and went to her workbench to assemble her guns. He leaned his bare back against the wall adjacent to her bunk. After about five minutes, she turned back to him. "What's wrong?" she asked.

He contemplated confronting her or just lying through his teeth. A part of him didn't want to know what she was really up to. He stood as she holstered her weapons, came to him, and embraced him with a kiss. He hugged her back, tightly, as if he might not see or taste her again. The truth was that he contemplated leaving his life in the bewildering world of the coven. "I'm just worried something's going to happen to you," he said softly. The kiss made him want so badly to believe in her.

"I'll be fine," she said smartly.

"Your clothes make me nervous. They remind me of other times that I'd much rather forget."

"It's prudent, Michael."

"Do you need me out there?"

She thought for a moment in the dark and then said, "No," and shook her head slightly. "You have a shift coming up tonight anyway."

"That's right."

"I'll call you when I'm done," she said as she gathered her coat.

"OK," he said softly and sat back down, suddenly conscious of his visitor status.

Then she strode out, shutting the door behind her, plunging him back into the dark.

  
\--0--  
  
  
An hour later, as the castle stirred to life in preparation for dealing a deathly blow to Emánuel's pack, he rose again from her bunk, ventured into the washroom, and helped himself to her shower and the smell he would miss.

After toweling off and dressing, he decided to satisfy his curiosity and began to search her suite for a .50 caliber weapon. As he rifled through her collection, he heard thumping footfalls in the corridor outside of her closed door. Still in his curious mind, he waited an appropriate interval and then cracked the door. Tantalized, he walked out, still in his socks, and padded down the corridor in pursuit of the smell. Two sections down, he came upon Kou, pushing open the door to his suite. As he crossed the threshold, he noticed Michael in his peripheral vision and turned around. Michael recovered and said, "Hey there. I thought you were Selene."

"Hi, Michael," he said. He stepped back out into the small open area and added, "Aside from the black clothing, very little resemblance."

Michael grinned and said, "Yes, and the moustache, too."

Kou chuckled.

"See you later," Michael said and then turned around. On the way back to Selene's suite, he processed what he'd seen: Kou wearing a sizable backpack and holding a full-size motorcycle helmet in his hand. Yes, he would need to leave the vampires soon. He certainly didn't want to be around for the inevitable counterattack on the castle and the cleanup of a new carpet of bodies.


	12. Echoes

Michael sat at the computer terminal in the castle library annex, head in hands. Then he propped his chin in his hand and reread the most recent e-mail from Lady Léna:

On Jan 18, 2004 10:58 AM, Léna Halldórsdóttir wrote:   
Dear Michael,

Yes, I heard about the vote. From my last e-mail: "I'm not surprised." I'm sorry to hear it.

Most of my last note had to do with vampire on vampire conflict. The Elders, believe it or not, kept it in check. With the Elders gone, there's so much more to keep track of and more centers of power to balance.

Léna

\----- Original Message ----  
From: Michael C   
To: Léna Halldórsdóttir   
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 9:22:48 AM  
Subject: Re: Memories question

Hi Lady Lena,

Thank you for your last note. Parts of it are puzzling to me. We (or rather, I) brought Emánuel to Lord Torma's manor for a meeting and it went well. Unfortunately, somebody (probably a lycan) took a shot at Lord Torma afterward. He didn't get hit (actually, I did), but now the coven is probably going to destroy Emánuel's hideout and kill him, too, if he's found.

So, it looks like we couldn't relate enough to the lycans to stop the hostilities. Isn't this what you meant by becoming the other? Surely you don't mean that immortals need to become hybrids in order to stop fighting?

Thanks again,

Michael Corvin

As he sat and contemplated the e-mail and the odd encounter with Kou, his mobile phone rang. "Yes?" he said, relieved to hear from her, despite her suspicious behavior earlier.

"Michael."

"How are you?" he asked, recovering from the surprise of the call.

"I think I'm being pursued."

"Where are you? I thought you'd be at the cottage by now."

"I've been driving around trying to see if my suspicions were true."

"Who's after you – the riders?"

"Yes. They're motorcycles – I can't see what they're wearing – but they're definitely following me. It's been going on for an hour and a half, now."

"Do you need help?"

She paused as if considering. "I think I'm all right. I can handle them."

"Are you still going to the house?"

"Yes."

"Call me back if you need help."

"Thanks – I'll let you know," she said.

"OK," he said and hung up. He felt as though he should say more, but now didn't seem the best time. He logged off and drummed his fingers on the table next to the mouse. He extended his fingernails and then retracted them. He found himself wishing, uncharacteristically, that Selene would somehow turn the tables on her pursuers and bash their heads in. Then he thought of something he could do. He extended his nails and allowed them to harden into place. He had no plans to return to the coven and perhaps neither to Selene, so he could ransack a suite and be unconcerned about consequences.

He got up and wandered upstairs a flight to the level that Selene and Kou shared and then proceeded to Kou's door. In the adrenaline rush of the early stages of the change, he simply opened the door to Kou's room and walked in. In front of him stood a very surprised, then concerned, and then irritated Kou.

"Can I help you?" he said in indignation.

Michael said nothing; only looked about the room.

Kou put a book down. Michael tracked the minutiae of his movements carefully. "What do you want, Michael?" he insisted.

"Why aren't you out there?" Michael asked in a voice grown husky.

"I'm the home guard, remember? I'm supposed to be here. Where are you supposed to be?" he asked with a lifted eyebrow.

Michael's gaze fell on a stack of clothing on a chair next to Kou's bureau. Michael fingered it and then partially lifted it.

Kou's eyes darted to the clothing.

"What's this?" Michael demanded, his own eyes following Kou's.

"What are you talking about?" Kou said.

"I said: what's this?" he demanded, a bit louder. He surprised himself at his control at this moment. He also evidently made an impression.

"Calm down, Michael," Kou said.

"Is this a day-suit?" Michael asked.

Kou looked at him nervously again.

"And don't lie," Michael added.

"As a matter of fact, it _is_ a day-suit. What's it to you?"

"What are you doing with it?"

"It's not illegal, Michael," he replied, not giving an inch. He'd tried to change the subject.

"No, it's what you do with it that may or may not be legal." Michael began to shake from rage and the Herculean effort to keep the full change in check. Then he felt something else – regret, perhaps – in anticipation of what Kou might do. He didn't know what he'd regret more: Kou telling a lie or the truth. Standing in front of him was one of Selene's teachers, after all. Not only that, but Selene and he had no doubt developed camaraderie through so many battles over the years – not dissimilar from his own experience in the operating theatre and to a lesser extent in his entanglements by Selene's side.

"As death dealers, we need to have all the necessary tools at our disposal. You and Selene have advantages that we don't..."

"I don't want to hear excuses. Daywalking vampires are a provocation. Just tell me the goddamned truth."

"I'm sorry you don't see our point of view," he said pointedly.

"If you don't come clean..." But Michael already knew.

"Alright!" he barked over Michael's rising voice and accompanying growling.

"Why?" He shook more. So much had happened because of a deception and, more recently, a misunderstanding. He felt betrayed, on behalf of Selene, by one of the most stalwart death dealers in the coven.

"Because of Zsanett," he said.

 _Of course,_ Michael thought. _Lycans killed her._ He'd heard the story of her death from Selene. "Your wife," he said simply.

"Have you ever lost somebody who meant the world to you?" Kou asked.

"As a matter of fact, I have." _And it may be happening again._

"Then you know how it feels."

"I am not starting a war because of it."

"Well, you have somebody new, now. And Selene, she has an advantage that I do not. Zsanett's lycans were real," he said.

Michael had stopped listening. He could be a fighter in the struggle for peace and this was a battle he could win. "Who's the leader of your group? Who's involved?" he demanded. He raised his right paw to telegraph his intention to strike.

"Why do you want to know? Just leave it be, Michael. It doesn't have to be a concern of yours."

Michael felt the adrenaline rush increasing and soon he would lose the ability to reason. _Oh, but to give in to it..._ "Who do you serve? Since you are so proud of your work, you shouldn't have a problem telling me. Is it Orbán?"

Kou just stared back at him.

"Do the right thing, soon, and I won't make you regret it." He'd become nearly unintelligible from losing his ability to form words. He couldn't find out the truth, though, if he killed Kou.

Kou remained silent.

"You know what the right thing is, don't you?" Michael gasped.

"Yes, it's Orbán," Kou said sarcastically.

Michael hissed and glared back at him.

"Yes," he emphasized.

Michael concentrated. "Who is the shooter of the vampires? Who shot me?"

"It's the same vampires."

"Stay here and keep your trap shut. If you tip off Orbán, you'd better disappear," Michael hissed.

"I don't know if I can do that," Kou countered.

Michael gritted his teeth and lashed out in the blink of an eye. Kou's head snapped to the side and he fell backward, smashing into a writing desk. Then as his senses recovered, he walked out of Kou's suite and shoved the door shut.

  
\--0--   
  
  
He wandered, dazed, back to Selene's suite. The change didn't recede as fast as it usually did. There was nothing to do, but he needed to be with Selene. Going into her suite would have to do. He went in, sat on her bunk, and shook with the effort to get himself back under control. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket and then rang. He got it out with his shaking hand, forcing himself to concentrate and operate it.

"Hello?" he croaked into it.

"Michael?" she said.

"Selene," he said in reply. Simply saying her name and hearing her voice calmed him down more.

"What's going on? I'm at the house, Michael, and it's crawling with vampires – like four of them."

"Do you know them?" Michael squeaked out. "Selene, I got Kou to confess."

"Kou? What?"

"Kou is involved in the vampires who are shooting lycans. They're the same as who are shooting at vampires."

"Why is he doing it?"

"Orbán is the ringleader."

"Orbán! I should've known. Oh, holy fu..." _Pop pop pop poppoppop!_ Then the call disconnected.

Michael stared at the dead phone, dumbly. _What to do, now? Think, hybrid!_ It took an effort comparable to expelling a bullet to force his mind to think. Selene was in a shootout. _Think!_ His impulse was to _run_ across town to get to her. He couldn't drive in his state. He got up, still clutching the mobile phone, and went back to Kou's suite.

He walked in and found Kou in his washroom. Kou looked up with a towel in one hand and with a wet face.

"Florian's mobile number!" Michael demanded. "How do I call Florian?" he roared.

Kou took a step further back into the washroom. "I'll give you his number, but he won't pick up the phone for you. For Selene, perhaps, he would."

Michael thought of striking Kou again, but growled instead, "If you have any real vampire left in you, find a way to get in touch with Florian and tell him to call off the attack!"

"I'll try, but if he's in battle..."

Michael turned away and walked out of the suite, concentrating on another mission. In the hall, he recalled a number that he'd memorized from playing with Selene's phone. With considerable effort, he dialed it.

"What do you want?" a voice snarled on the other end.

Michael straightened and enunciated as best he could. "This is Michael Corvin."

"Yes? And?"

"You better clear out of the art gallery."

"Why?"

"The vampires are coming and they're going to kill as many of you as they can."

The line went momentarily silent as Emánuel probably palmed his mobile and had a brief, muffled, conversation with somebody else. "What's all this about?" he said afterward.

"Just get out!" Michael growled. "They think you tried to kill Lord Torma."

"I told..."

"Why don't you believe me? OK, here's what you can do. Selene is fighting vampires _right now_ – the same vampires that have been stalking your pack – the same vampires that have been shooting at other vampires – and she could use your help."

"Why can't she get vampire help?"

"Because they don't know she's there and they're all coming to your hideout!" Michael snapped as loudly as his half-changed vocal chords could manage.

"I'm not too happy with Selene right now – she called me up and upbraided me for doing what you just said these other vampires are doing."

 _So that's who she was talking to this afternoon._ "Yes, I was there. It's all a misunderstanding. We know what's going on, now. So, please do this."

"All right. We'll send a contingent."

"OK – well, I've done all I can," Michael rasped in resignation. The change had receded by about 80% and his temper and voice had improved. _At least some of them will live._

"Thank you for your call," Emánuel said and hung up.

Michael prepared to fling his phone across the suite, but then thought better of it. He put his clothes to rights and gathered his wallet and keys.

"Where do you think you're going?" asked Kou from the doorway.

"I'm going to try and stop a war. Interested? If not, get the hell out of my way."

"I think you're going to need me," Kou said.


	13. The Line

"The hell," said Michael. "I think you'll need me to keep Selene from taking your head off. Come to think of it, you should probably stay here in case I decide to do it myself." In another time, he'd be surprised to make that comment.

Kou made no reply, but did step aside as Michael left Selene's suite. Kou then followed him, wordlessly, out of the keep and into the garage where Michael retrieved his battered VW. Michael sensed no hostility in him, but then again, he'd just showered and put on a fresh uniform, making discernment difficult.

"Seriously, I can go by myself."

"Michael, you don't know what you're getting into. You're going to need my help."

"All right, get in," he said. "Holy shit," he added under his breath and shook his head.

Kou made no further attempt at conversation on the way toward Budapest. In the silence, Michael considered Kou's reasoning and decided he'd seen it before, of course, in Selene. She'd made the same judgment, albeit based on wrong information, and it had defined her for centuries. Michael's loss had been at the hands of random chance, so he had no evil agent to slay, over and over again. He worked, however, to save lives rather than to take them. No, Kou needed convincing that aggression wasn't the only way, but he was afraid that doing otherwise wasn't in the vocabulary of the likes of Kou. If Selene was a typical example, death dealers thrived on the adrenaline rush of the conquest and kill of a lycan. The closest he'd come to that feeling was when he'd been in the change, running on pure animal will.

As they rode on the motorway, Michael tried Selene's mobile number several times with no response. Then he phoned Nicholas to let him know that he would be late for his shift or not in at all due to a "family emergency."

Kou's phone went off and he put it to his ear. "Yeah. We're on our way in, Michael and I... Well I've got something to tell you on that account... I've been involved with a group of vampires that have been continuing the war... Yes, we were the ones... Yes, sir, I completely understand. No, I don't know where she is." He hung up. "That was Florian."

"So you _did_ call." Michael didn't know whether to be astonished by that fact or that he'd just admitted his complicity to the world.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I can see the writing on the wall. When we see Florian, I'll...."

"Where do you think we're going? I'm driving to where Selene is."

Kou turned sideways and looked at him. "Where's that?"

Michael's phone rang and he looked at the number on the display. "This is her, now." He flipped it open. "Hey. I was getting worried. What was all that about?"

"Vampires opened up, right in the middle of the neighborhood."

"Jesus Christ."

"I'm coming back to the art gallery."

"I see. What about the vampires? What did you do with them?"

"I'll have to fill you in when we get there."

"We?"

"Things are still hot at the art gallery. Florian needs reinforcements."

Michael looked sideways at Kou. "Really?"

"And also some details cleared up. See you there?"

"Yes, see you in a bit – perhaps a half-hour or 45."

They hung up and Michael turned to Kou. "What did Florian tell you?"

"They're in a standoff – a classic stalking situation."

"OK. Fine. We'll go there, then. Selene and persons unknown are coming up from the cottage in Buda."

"What was she doing there?"

"Taking care of some of your friends, I think."

Kou faced forward and swallowed. Michael had never seen him this rattled.

  
\--0--   
  
  
They looped into the city by the most direct route, on the E71. Kou instructed him to take Állatkerti Boulevard, which would take them directly to their destination at the Museum of Fine Arts. Skirting the west side of City Park and the lake, they ran into a fog bank.

At this time of cool, January night, with most tourists and sightseers driven indoors, they found readily available parking along the street on the east side of the museum. Ahead of them the Archangel hung above, bathed in hazy white. As Michael applied the parking brake, Kou scanned the small tree-covered promenade between the street and the building.

"What do you see?" asked Michael.

"Not a whole hell of a lot. I see several figures up there that are probably lycans. They've gathered in a semicircle, waiting for Florian and the rest to come out. You'd never know it, but they're watching that set of double doors right over there – which we're also familiar with." Kou indicated a small stairwell leading down from the promenade level, with only the top portion of the doors visible. Then he turned around and looked behind them in the direction of the City Park. Michael did so, as well.

"I think we probably have some vampires across the street or nearby, but it's so thick that I can't tell. Not good conditions for vampires."

"How did the lycans get in here?"

"They just walked right on in. Likely they were tipped off," Kou said, raising his eyebrows toward Michael. "Besides, it's a free country."

At any other time, Michael might have grinned. He was still mightily displeased at Kou and wanted to find out what Kou's present game was despite being found out. He'd recovered, though, a bit of his usual deadpan humor.

They got out and scanned their surroundings. Several heads on fog-shrouded bodies amongst the trees turned almost imperceptibly their way and then returned to whatever focused their attention before. His nose confirmed a diffuse lycan and vampire smell to complement what his nebulous vision told him. "Plenty of immortals here," Michael said. "Several across the street, as you said."

"I see Ádám," Kou said staring into the white fog bank below street lights. Then he turned back toward the building. "I count 12 lycans here. I'd say we're evenly matched."

"Let's go see Florian and find out what his situation is."

"We can't cross the line," Kou snapped.

"Sure we can. I'm not a vampire or a lycan. Let's go."

They walked up the stone steps from the street and walked 20 paces to a gap between a group of three lycans and another solitary. They received the same brief notice as before from the lycan line that they now breached. Arriving at the maintenance door, Michael gave a stout rap. Henrik greeted them through a crack in the door and then they slipped inside. Henrik closed the door behind them with a muffled clunk. _Probably forced,_ Michael thought.

Through the passages lined with conduits and breaker boxes they went, eventually leading to the secret entrance to their destination – also forced open, with pungent aromas of exercised vampires and dead lycans pouring out. Inside the network of tunnels, they found Florian and others conversing amongst themselves. Florian gave Kou a poisonous look as they approached. Michael left that conversation and explored the maze further within in search of the source of the lycan smell. Before locating the source, he found physical signs of their struggle – blood smeared on the subterranean corridor floor. Following the gore and the acrid smell, he came to a side room, deeper in the cavernous system than he'd been previously. Within he found the remains of just two lycans, but bearing hacking and slicing wounds. Michael averted his eyes and then of a sudden realized that the two corpses alone didn't account for all of, in his estimation, the smell. The hacked open bodies threw off quite a bit of dead smell, but he could detect something else behind it.

"Must have been sentries," Kou said from the doorway.

"That's what it looks like," Michael said. But inwardly, alarms went off. He returned to the doorway and met Kou face to face. He looked out and to his left, which led to daylight and then looked to his right, from which additional lycan smell emanated. "You know what I think?" he said to Kou.

Kou nodded upward once.

"I think we need to get the hell out of here." He shouldered past Kou and went to a forward room and Lord Florian's court. "Lord," he said.

Florian faced him and gave him his full, though exaggerated, attention. _This better be good,_ Michael imagined Florian thought, if his expression was any indication.

"You didn't kill all of the lycans," he said.

"Usually we don't, Michael," Florian replied as if talking to a child.

"There are more, deeper. I think we need to leave this lair right now."

"Selene hasn't arrived yet. Extraction isn't done recklessly and we do not shrink from any lycan challenge," Florian declared.

"I'll see you at the surface, then," Michael said and walked out past Kou and Orbán who had appeared in the doorway. Michael gave Orbán and the sword he bore a pointed look.

"We can take them on, Lord," said Orbán.

Michael looked back at the lot of them. "It's madness to stay here," he said. Evidently Florian hadn't taken any action to put Orbán under arrest. Michael wondered if he shared Selene's concern about rogue vampires and their illegal turns.

"We could use your help, Michael," Orbán said. He sounded as reasonable as he always did.

Florian's mobile phone came to life.

 _"Selene is here, Lord,"_ Henrik said.

"Thank you," Florian said. "Vampires, we're going to the surface. Bring Uli."

Kou and Orbán made only brief eye contact and then left the lair with the rest of them. Eight vampires and one hybrid paraded through the machine room and the conduit-lined corridors and then out the double doors to the outside. At the surface, the audience of vague silhouettes amongst the trees came to attention. Near Michael's VW, a van had appeared that hadn't been there before. After a few moments, the side door slid open and four figures slipped out.

They stepped up to the promenade level and Michael realized that one of the distinctly shaped figures was Selene. The other figures stopped at the lycan line as she strode through the trees in almost the same place that Michael and Kou had gone earlier. She bore a large shoulder bag under her left arm and approached Florian. _Where's the Audi?_ Michael wondered.

"Glad to see you're alive, Selene," Florian said, nodding to the lycans behind her. "You've got some explaining to do," he added. "I expected you to be a participant in this raid."

"It's Orbán who has explaining to do," Selene spat. She tossed the shoulder bag onto the cold, stone walk with a muffled clunk.

"Open it, Orbán," said Florian over his shoulder.

Orbán came forward, settled down to the ground, and unzipped the bag. He held it open to reveal the contents: an assortment of guns, two of which were rifles. He looked up.

"At the bottom of the bag are spare magazines," Selene said.

"Give me one of the guns, Orbán," Florian said.

Orbán handed him one and also produced one of the magazines, which glowed blue. Florian frowned, loaded the magazine, and then pointed the heavy weapon at Orbán. "Kou?" he asked.

"Yes, Lord, he is the source of the conspiracy."

"My Lord!" Orbán hissed back at Kou, who remained stoic. "It's Selene who has explaining to do. She and her... thing... have been openly conspiring with lycans. Look at how she flouts the covenant."

"Orbán," Florian said, "I know what she's done and I know what you've done. Kou has been keeping me informed. I don't like challenges to my authority or to my patience. Can you give me a reason why I shouldn't put an UV slug in you right now?"

"Lord, he should be put on trial. Even Lord Viktor spared Lord Tanis' life for what he did," said Selene.

Another voice from the lycan line growled, "Give him to us, we will administer justice."

"No," said Florian, straightening. "He'll be tried."

"And what of the lycan lives you took this evening?" Emánuel said.

"Selene?"

"Four vampires lost their lives in Buda tonight," she said.

"By your hand or theirs?"

"Both, Lord. I couldn't have done it without them and not remain discreet."

"You went with the intention of killing them?"

"No, Lord, merely to question." After a beat, she added, "If I am to be tried, let it be in the presence of Council, I beg of you, Lord," said Selene.

"Orbán," Florian said, "you're under arrest. Do you want to return to the castle under your own power or not?" Orbán considered his situation for a few moments under Florian's stare and then relented. Under his breath, Florian said, "Just so he doesn't try anything, Kou, Izidor, keep an eye on him. We're going to leave."

"We enjoyed your visit," Emánuel said.

Florian pointed the rifle skyward. "Four vampires in exchange for two lycans tonight seems like a fair trade, do you agree? I trust this will not lead to any further incident for the moment."

"So long as there is no further injury to lycans this night forward, there will be, of course, no grudge from my pack."

"Ádám," Florian barked into his mobile phone. "File in, we're withdrawing."

After a few moments, five vampires emerged from the fog, made their way across the street, and trotted up to the pedestrian promenade. They joined Florian's group under the watchful eyes of the assembled lycans and then moved past, on their way toward Heroes' Square. Ádám, ever the rebel, had drawn his machine pistol and pointed it at the ground.

"Selene," Florian then said, "bring up the rear with silver."

She walked east with them, with her own weapon drawn, in the traditional position reserved for a sacrificial vampire – to be given over to the enemy while the rest slipped back to the coven. Whether in this instance she was given that role because of Florian's pique or she was indestructible, Michael wasn't sure.

  
\--0--   
  
  
After the vampires left the stage, Michael turned back to the road in front of him. Several of the tree trunks moved in the haze and then walked toward him. Then he was amidst them. They gave him a passing glance, as if he were now something inanimate, on their way to the double doors. He whistled one line of a made-up tune, and then decided it wouldn't be a good idea to stay once the lycans found the bodies inside. He took two steps toward the street and then noticed an incoming object out of the corner of his eye. He put his hand up reflexively, in time to catch a set of keys. A single lycan, female, walked past him a few paces away. "Unload it and bring it back," she said.

"Of course," he muttered.

Dead vampire smell assaulted him as he opened the door and got in. He started it and headed east on Állatkerti. He went around the roundabout that bordered Heroes' Square and found the other vampires walking around the front of Mücsarnok, presumably toward their cars. He stopped the van and tapped the horn, catching Selene's attention.

She turned around and barked out Kou's name. She put her phone to her ear as she approached the van. Before she got in the passenger seat, she wordlessly pointed toward a rear seat – strongly suggesting that he sit amongst the bodies. After he shut the sliding door, she twisted around in her seat, eyes nearly on fire with fury. "Short-sighted bastard," she hissed at Kou. "The lycans are going to kill us all, and then everything would have been pretty pointless, wouldn't it?"

By way of reply, he stared at the lump of shot up, bloody vampire bodies behind him.

"What happened to you, Kou? You were an ally of Amelia once."

"I served Amelia and the coven was strong. What happened to you, ally of Viktor?"

"I found out that I was living a lie. You know that."

"That doesn't change what you are or what the coven is. You say you have responsibilities, but that responsibility seems to stop where your family tragedy is concerned."

"You can't bring her back, Kou," she said and then looked over at Michael. "We can't bring any of them back. We've got to move on, and we will, whether we like it or not."

"Did you really let lycans kill them?"

After a beat, she said, "I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but the lycans are entitled to defend themselves."

"And we're not?"

"We _are,_ and nothing else. This is what we are now, Kou: defenders. Choose wisely, Kou, because I intend to defend the peace from vampires like you. When we get back to the castle, you can shovel these into the furnace. Be quick about it so Michael can get his VW back before it gets towed."

After ramping onto the motorway heading north, Michael asked, "What was with Florian's comment to Kou – about being informed?"

"That was Florian's idea of a joke. He said it to torture Orbán. He was as clueless as the rest of us," she replied, keeping her eyes on the road.


	14. Epilogue

In his small office in the rear of the library stacks, where once upon a time Lord Tanis had dwelt, Štefan updated the coven intranet:

_Writ of Council 12-338 (February 22, 2004): Orbán, soldier of Castle Víg, stood before an empanelled jury of the Lower Council, and being found guilty of violating Covenant §32.2.2 [Ownership of the Right to Turn], Covenant §04.16.1 [Retention of Authority in Chain of Command], Covenant §01.1.5 [Accomplice to Execution of Vampire without Authority], and Covenant §03.3.1 [Sedition], it is hereby ordered that Orbán, soldier of Castle Víg, be executed and that Council appoints Kou, death dealer, to carry out the sentence in due form and report back to Council within two days' time._

_Writ of Council 12-339 (February 22, 2004): Selene, death dealer of Castle Víg, stood before an empanelled jury of the Lower Council, and being found guilty of violating Covenant §04.16.1 [Retention of Authority in Chain of Command], Covenant §N5.1.8 [Permitted Interactions with Lycanthropes], and Writ of Council 12-319, it is hereby ordered that Selene, death dealer of Castle Víg, be placed into solitary exile for a period of one year and one day and that Council appoints Haruye, death dealer, to carry out the sentence in due form and report back to Council within two days' time. It is also hereby ordered that Haruye be appointed guardian of Selene her ward for the express purpose of feeding and protection as long as Selene remains in exile._

  
\--0--   
  
  
Lost in their song, he cast into the river. No longer did he fish for dinner or for pleasure. They'd found him here as they filled the air with their bodies, their wings, and their calls. Quietness and peace had been what he'd sought in this normally quiet place after the events of just months ago, but he found himself amongst the brood, vastly outnumbered. He gave in to the white noise, letting their calls merge with the static of his own thoughts. He'd been cheered when he'd remembered that they were due this year, 17 years after their last visit in that memorable spring long ago.

He wished she could be there with him to share in the cicadas' latest reign, but even without her exile, the government would've probably had a field day with her passport and identity. So, in his imagination, she walked with him on the shore, along the trails, and along the towpath, nothing identifiable about her except her teeth, which she exposed in smiles only for him. He wanted to see the things that she saw and wanted her to see things that he saw. Things that he thought beautiful he wanted for her. Away from the conflict he could know her when they could simply _be_ and discover what could _be_.


End file.
